Samsung 860 QVO 1TB and 4TB SATA SSD Review

cageymaru

cageymaru

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Allyn Malventano from PC Perspective has reviewed the new QVO budget SSD lineup from Samsung. The particular SSD drives being reviewed today are the Samsung 860 QVO 1TB ($150) and 4TB ($600). The review starts off with the read performance in the Burst 4KB Random testing showing half of the performance of a Samsung 860 EVO, but the drives were quite "average" for the rest of the testing. Check out the review to see how the Samsung QLC product lineup fared during testing.

Now we're talking! 15 cents per GB MSRP for *any* decent SSD is certainly music to my ears. Sure the performance is not Pro-like, but at those prices, it's not hard to justify some concessions. I would like to see caching performance improve on that 4TB model though, and if Samsung hopes to push more QLC product, they will need to improve those low QD random read latencies.
 
I am interested to see how they will adapt this for the Enterprise storage market.
 
Hmm, I wonder what limiting factor was for only populating 1/2 the PCB was, price? Would love to see a 8GB one, it'll be great for storage in a laptop.
 
1st gen QLC product, pass. I'll check back in 3 years when there's more mileage data on these.

Note: I don't use TLC drives yet, but am considering buying one soon.
 
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The bigger point is that Samsung now has an excellent product range, all fabbed and built by them. High-end Pro drives, medium-level consumer EVO drives, and economy QLC drives. The lineup seems complete and shouldn't contain any duds.

In the past Samsung has used overruns of the previous model as their economy drive. I'm wondering if in the future we'll start to see Samsung's backstock of older drives disappear quickly.

As far as price, this is the pre-Christmas Black Friday time frame, yeah I can find a 1TB Samsung drive for similar money, but you can't expect those prices to be here in January. The prices will work themselves out.


Note: About three times since Thanksgiving I've almost bought a 1TB SSD, but each time I held off because I didn't actually need it. I know I'm gonna kick myself later.
 
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The Mad Atheist said:
Hmm, I wonder what limiting factor was for only populating 1/2 the PCB was, price? Would love to see a 8GB one, it'll be great for storage in a laptop.
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PCB space is practically free, and this gives them the ability down the road to produce an 8TB version without any additional engineering or tooling costs.
 
I'd love to see the 4TB go under $200, I'd probably start replacing my spinners for video storage at that point (silence is worth a bit of a premium).
 
WhoMe said:
I'd love to see the 4TB go under $200, I'd probably start replacing my spinners for video storage at that point (silence is worth a bit of a premium).
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I'd love a lucky pot of gold at the end of every rainbow, but $50/TB ain't happening any time soon.
 
Tweak42 said:
1st gen QLC product, pass. I'll check back in 3 years when there's more mileage data on these.

Note: I don't use TLC drives yet, but am considering buying one soon.
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4 bits per cell and a whole lot of internal micromanagement of data. It just seems like a way to ride the popularity of SSDs.

I mean, we have large, stable data storage (spinners and tape) and fast data storage (SSD), pick one. With TLC and QLC you only get to pick one (fast) up to a limited capacity and a limited lifetime before it starts to struggle rearranging your data to optimize for longevity. Or at least that's the theory.

To be fair, it should work pretty well as a disposable data drive up to about 3/4 capacity.
 
These new products are also using the same 64 layer 3D NAND as the previous drives. As Samsung's ongoing 96 layer manufacturing matures, we could be seeing another range of MLC/TLC drives some time next year.
 
I think I'll continue being patient and wait for NVME drives to come down further in price. I want a 1 TB NVME from Samsung for $150.
 
WhoMe said:
My first hard drive was a 33MB RLL and cost like $300
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My first hardddrive was a GVP 600 MB harddrive for my Amiga 500+, set me back 1000 USD and that was way back in the day.
My first PC harddrive was a 1.3 GB Fujitsu drive, that at the time only set me back 500 USD
 
Oldmodder said:
My first hardddrive was a GVP 600 MB harddrive for my Amiga 500+, set me back 1000 USD and that was way back in the day.
My first PC harddrive was a 1.3 GB Fujitsu drive, that at the time only set me back 500 USD
Click to expand...

Yeah, I remember my 50MB SCSI hard drive for my Amiga 500 with an bus case off the left side. Although it cost about $500, it was worth it and was really fast at that time. (I had a 68030 upgrade and installed 4MB of ram in the expansion slots of that drive case.) Now I spent $220 on a 2TB SSD and was thinking of cancelling the order but, it has already shipped. Priorities sure do change over time.
 
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$600 for 4TB? Hmmmm..... it would be interesting if they could come up with a technique that has a m.2 drive and one of these things show up as a single drive, however, in the background, have the frequently-accessed stuff (OS, programs) on the m.2 drive and the data and such on the slower drive. As it is now, I believe you get diminishing results when upgraded to a larger SSD.

Of course, I have been surprised at some of the prices of SSDs. A Newegg ad had a Team Group SSD for $55, and a SanDisk SSD for $70. Both were 480GB SSD drives. I can hear the nails being driven into the spinning rust's coffin now. However, when you look at the larger sizes of hard drives, spinning rust isn't that bad, especially for data that you only occasionally need.
 
WhoMe said:
I'd love to see the 4TB go under $200, I'd probably start replacing my spinners for video storage at that point (silence is worth a bit of a premium).
Click to expand...

Silence, plus information density. Even a small box full.of these could replace my rack mount home server. And be silent. And use less power. And not do the third of of three things hard drives do as frequently: read, write, and die. I've killed a bunch of spinners, haven't had an SSD crap out on me yet. Bought all Samsung Evos, though, whatever was current at the time.
 
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Oldmodder said:
My first hardddrive was a GVP 600 MB harddrive for my Amiga 500+, set me back 1000 USD and that was way back in the day.
My first PC harddrive was a 1.3 GB Fujitsu drive, that at the time only set me back 500 USD
Click to expand...
Yeah I remember my first hard 1GB hard drive was like $600...but wow seemed like it would take years to fill it. Never got a hard drive for my Amiga, but sure had a lot of fun with that computer, still sometimes regret selling it :). I had hoped SSD prices would fall faster, but they are getting there. I did have one of those 33RLL drives last over five years (in a business I sold it to) before I pulled it for being too low capacity. Who remembers having to park their hard drives?
 
And here I'm still using drives a pair of 256GB Crucial drives from 2011 that cost me about $370 each from a super discounted third party vendor and a pair of 256GB Samsung 840 pros I bought in 2013 for $230 each. Prices sure have come down... to say nothing of how platter drive prices have changed over the years.

At least I know these older MLC SSDs of mine have had decent reliability.
 
QVO > EVO

I have an idea for their next cheap premium flash storage brand: I present to you the QRO SSDs. Because, again, Q > P
 
Joust said:
Silence, plus information density. Even a small box full.of these could replace my rack mount home server. And be silent. And use less power. And not do the third of of three things hard drives do as frequently: read, write, and die. I've killed a bunch of spinners, haven't had an SSD crap out on me yet. Bought all Samsung Evos, though, whatever was current at the time.
Click to expand...
I've killed a few SSDs over the years. Most of them running Sandforce or Phison MLC controllers. The Kingston MLC drives are holding up (I believe that's a Sandforce), but I haven't run them anywhere near as hard and have been downgraded to game console expansion.

The Samsung EVOs (V-NAND) are still running strong under very heavy abuse (especially the 960), so I do have some optimism for Samsung QLC for general use, but we have to wait and see.
 
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