In previous years, if you wanted a fast and large storage solution (without remortgaging), the best you could do was a Samsung 4TB 860 QVO drive. When Samsung launched the 860 range of drives back in November of 2018, they were some of the fastest and largest storage options available to the mass-market everyday user.
Fast forward to 2020 and Samsung has iterated yet again with their brand new range of 2.5″ SSDs, the 870 QVO range. The 870 range of SSDs features a whole host of improvements over the previous generation of solid state drives. Most notably, the 870 QVO is available in a whopping 8TB storage option.
With the prevalence of 4K Video, Thousand Megapixel Cameras and AAA Games commonly taking up over 200GB of our precious data space, it’s no surprise that Samsung is coming out with a monster 8TB solid state storage option.
The new 870 range is available in 1TB, 2TB, 4TB and 8TB sizes.
870 QVO vs 860 QVO
The 870 QVO improves on the 860 series in a number of ways, even if we ignore the doubling of the top-line capacity. Since this news is so fresh, we’ve not had a chance to get our hands on a sample for testing, so this is purely a published spec against published specs.
| 860 QVO 4TB | 870 QVO 4TB | |
| Seq Read/Write | 550MB/s / 520MB/s | 560MB/s / 530MB/s |
| 4K Random Read/Write (QD1) | 7,500 / 42,000* | 11,000 / 35,000* |
| 4K Random Read/Write (QD32) | 97,000 / 89,000* | 98,000 / 88,000* |
| Controller | MJX Controller | MKX Controller |
| NAND Flash Memory | 4bit MLC V-NAND (QLC) | 4bit MLC V-NAND (QLC) |
| DRAM Cache Memory | 4GB LPDDR4 | 4GB LPDDR4 |
| Total Bytes Written | 1,440TB | 1,440TB |
In a side-by-side comparison, the 870 QVO drive is a fair upgrade to its 860 QVO predecessor. Whilst it’s not making any serious breakthroughs in any one area, the improved Read and Write speeds are a welcome benefit for that additional speed of transferring files. These drives are literally at top of what can be achieved with your SATA interface.
If you think you’re going to be needing anything faster than 560MB/s read speeds and 530MB/s write, you should be looking into NVMe storage options.
By far Samsung’s biggest improvement in the 870 range is simply their 8TB offering, something that isn’t available in a 2.5″ SSD format from anywhere else. The 8TB also features a much high TBW than the smaller sizes at 2,280TB.
Testing
We have not yet been able to get tour hands on a sample of the drives yet for testing, but when we do, we’ll update you on how how it performs compared to other drives on the market.
Availability
Available for these drives seems pretty good, with most capacities available to the market in the coming months. Samsung’s current goals are to have the 1TB sizes available by mid July 2020, 2TB and 4TB options by August 2020 and the 8TB variation isn’t speculated to hit our stores until September 2020.
More information on the 870 QVO can be found on Samsung’s website.
