Samsung 870 QVO SATA III 2.5 SSD 4TB (MZ-77Q4T0B) review – is it good for gaming?

Can you store 4K games in Samsung 870 QVO SATA III 2.5 SSD 4TB (MZ-77Q4T0B)? With an expanded SATA interface limit of 560/530 MB/s sequential speeds, the 870 QVO improves random access speed and sustained performance. From everyday computing to 8K video processing — with up to 600 TBW² with a stable host experience, low lag with the 6th generation VNAND, and steady performance when multi-tasking with the powerful MKX controller. Find everything that you need to know in Samsung 870 QVO SATA III 2.5 SSD 4TB (MZ-77Q4T0B) review.

Pros & Cons – Samsung 870 QVO SATA III 2.5 SSD 4TB (MZ-77Q4T0B)

Pros

• AES 256-bit encryption
• Good overall performance
• Very fast 4K read and write speeds
• Insane capacity up to 8TB.
• Three-year warranty.
• Excellent companion software.
• Feature-rich Magician management software
• Improved and more competitive performance

Cons

• QLC’s modest durability ratings make it less suited to heavy write duty
• Write speeds a little off manufacturer claims
• Warranty is only three years
• Slow write performance after SLC cache fills

Specs – Samsung 870 QVO SATA III 2.5 SSD 4TB (MZ-77Q4T0B)

Price

Aimed at both professionals and mainstream users, the SSD 870 QVO (starts at $129.99; $249.99 for the 2TB version.

At around $0.11-$0.13 per gigabyte, Samsung priced the 870 QVO lower than the 860 QVO’s launch pricing. The company says it improved random performance by 13% at a queue depth (QD) of 1 thanks to the new controller and flash. 

Compare Samsung 870 QVO SATA III 2.5 SSD 4TB (MZ-77Q4T0B) vs Samsung 970 EVO Plus

Samsung 870 QVO SATA III 2.5 SSD 4TB (MZ-77Q4T0B) review

Build

Samsung’s 870 QVO comes in a 2.5″ 7mm SATA form factor and sports an all-metal casing, differentiating it from most SATA SSDs that come with cheap plastic cases. It also features a slightly darker grey finish than the 860 QVO before it.

Design

The 870 QVO 2TB model comes with a Samsung MKX Controller and has 4GB of LPDDR4 DRAM Cache memory. The Cache memory ranges from 1GB to 8GB depending upon the various storage sizes this SSD comes in i.e., up to 8TB.

Light weight

This drive comes in the standard 2.5-inch enclosure found on many SATA SSDs, but weighs a surprisingly light 46 grams, dropping the weight of its 62-gram predecessor. 

Memory

Samsung’s 870 QVO uses 1GB of LPDDR4 DRAM per terabyte of capacity for the controller to use as buffer space for NAND management and background tasks, while the controller cores manage host interaction, reading, and writing tasks.

Capacity

The SSD 870 QVO is a 9x-layer QLC V-NAND SATA SSD that is launching in four different storage-volume sizes: 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and an especially tasty-looking 8TB. Samsung rates the drive to hit a maximum sequential write speed of 530MBps, and 560MBps on sequential reads. Its speed ratings are the same across all four of the available capacities. Here’s a breakout of the four versions, along with calculations of the cost per gigabyte for each based on the list price at launch…

Read & write speed

The QVO’s specs list the drive at up to 560/530 MBps of sequential read/write throughput and up to 98,000/88,000 random read/write IOPS. Samsung bases these speeds on SLC caching performance, but after the cache fills, write performance will degrade to much slower speeds. 

TurboWrite in Samsung 870 QVO SATA III 2.5 SSD 4TB (MZ-77Q4T0B)

Samsung’s 870 QVO uses the same Intelligent TurboWrite SLC caching mechanism as the 860 QVO. Samsung’s Intelligent TurboWrite is a hybrid caching implementation with both a static 6GB SLC cache at all capacities for the 860 QVO, and an additional 36GB or 72GB dynamic cache (varies based on drive capacity). For the 1TB 870 QVO, the Intelligent TurboWrite cache measures up to 42GB, while the higher-capacity models have up to 78GB of cache.

SSD vs SATA

The sequential-read and -write ceilings of 560MBps and 530MBps of the SSD 870 QVO, mentioned above, represent just about the maximum of what the mature SATA 3.0 standard can muster in terms of raw throughput. However, one area Samsung claims to have made advances (over its own SATA-based predecessor) is in a “13 percent improvement in 4K random read speeds.” Why this matters: The 4K random read is one of the most critical real-world figures in SSD performance measurement, as it tends to reflect how quickly a drive loads software such as games and productivity applications, or an operating system.

Game

4K is one of the more commonly used file-block sizes for game installations, though that composition does depend on the title you’re playing. While the three games tested in PCMark 10 are primarily stored in small random 4K, tests from around the web have shown that MMORPGs can more often use the 16K block size, and some games in other genres may tend to employ larger block sizes, from 32K up to 128K. However for the sake of these tests, 4K small random read is the most accurate block-size metric relevant to these three popular FPS titles: Battlefield 5, Overwatch, and Call of Duty: Black Ops 4.

Software & Maintenance

The Q70 QVO can be managed with the Samsung Magician tool which has most of the basic features to manage your drive and data. Under the Drive Management tab, you have five different handy features – Drive Details, Performance Benchmark, Diagnostic Scan, Over Provisioning, and Performance Optimisation. The Diagnostic Scan feature lets you scan and fix any sorts of error on the disk and gives you 3 options – Short Scan, Full Scan, and SMART Self-Test which includes Short/Extended scans.

Under Data Management, you get 3 features – Secure Erase, PSID Revert (Physical Security ID), and the most interesting and nifty feature – AES 256-bit Encryption. It encrypts the SSD with BitLocker and you can easily enable or disable encryption, right from the Samsung Magician tool. This is something other SSDs in this segment do not have and the Samsung 870 QVO has an edge here.

Samsung 870 QVO SATA III 2.5 SSD 4TB (MZ-77Q4T0B) performance review

Things only start to unravel when you start transferring a tonne of data. For my tests, I transferred 170 GB of assorted images and video (a mix of files ranging from 12 MB to 16 GB in size), and about 150 GB of tiny, 1 KB files mixed in with a few larger ones.

The data was transferred to and from a Corsair MP600 PCIe Gen 4 M.2 SSD with a read/write speed of over 3,000 MB/s to ensure that there was no bottleneck on that front.

When writing to the disk, however, once the cache was full, speeds dropped to an abysmal 50 MB/s. This is about a third of what you’d get from an internal HDD, and still about 20–60 MB/s slower than what you’d get from an external, 5,400 rpm HDD over USB 3.0.

In both tests, read speeds were quite decent at about a 430 MB/s average. As expected, speeds hit SATA caps (around 550 MB/s) till about 42 GB (the size of the SLC cache), and then dropped to about 300–400 MB/s.

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with our own custom blocks of data. Our 50GB data set includes 31,227 files of various types, like pictures, PDFs, and videos. Our 100GB includes 22,579 files with 50GB of them being large movies. We copy the data sets to new folders and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly written 6.5GB zip file and 15GB movie file.

Samsung 870 QVO SATA III 2.5 SSD 4TB (MZ-77Q4T0B) customer review

4 terabyte sdd drive by samsung

I download a lot of music which is stored in windows media player and also in the music folder and because of that it takes up a lot of space on the operating drive. So I had best buy transfer the operating system from the computer onto the sdd drive and then install it in the computer along with the drives that came with the computer so I also had access to those drives also the sdd drive is much faster and works great. the drive also came with Samsung magician that allows you to monitor your drives and can send updates nice tool lets you resolve issues with the drive.

By superbill66 at Best Buy

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