Samsung's SSD has some good looks for people who use glass panels on their PCs.
Samsung is currently one of the most preferred brands in the solid-state storage (SSD) category. The company has been releasing fast and reliable SSDs for quite some time now. The recently launched Samsung 870 QVO SSD is no exception. It is now available in 1TB, 2TB, 4TB and 8TB storage variants. The 2.5-inch SATA based SSD offers a bump in performance for people looking to upgrade their old laptops. But is it worth the asking price? Let’s find out.
Samsung 870 QVO SSD Review
Samsung SSDs are mostly known for their premium quality materials and ultra-fast storage speeds. However, the case was quite different with the 870 QVO. With this, the company was focusing on bringing the prices down. Now, the company is challenging brands like Crucial and Western Digital by offering plenty of storage at a reasonable price point.
In the road to bringing the prices down, the company had to face some technical challenges. The SSD is made with Samsung’s new 9x-layer production process. This helped the company to stuff 4bits of data in the same amount of NAND module space.
We tested the 1TB variant.
Further, the 860 QVO is among the first consumer-level SSDs to feature quad-level-cell (QLC) storage. QLC uses four bits per memory cell to save on costs, however, it slows down the \read and write speeds. Samsung has managed to fix the speeds with its "Intelligent TurboWrite" technology. The drive always uses 6GB of cache but can use up to 42GB on 1TB or 78GB on 2GB or higher variants if required.
Samsung claims that the drive can hit a maximum sequential read speed of 560MBps and 560MBps on sequential reads. While not exactly as promised, the read and write speeds came quite closed to the ones promised by Samsung on our benchmarks.
CrystalMark results.
In real-world usage, the SSD performs just as good as it gets. I installed the drive on my laptop replacing my old 5400RPM HDD. Even though my hard drive was accelerated using Intel Optane, the Samsung SSD brought a major performance boost to the table. Windows boot time was lesser than 10 seconds and even game launches were significantly faster.
Also Read: WD My Passport 2TB external hard drive review
Samsung 870 QVO SSD offers great performance and a bang for the buck as it comes at a starting price of Rs. 9,999. Yes, there are cheaper drives available from brands like ADATA, Crucial and WD. However, they are not as reliable and fast as the QVO 870. In case you are upgrading from a regular hard drive, any SSD would bring a major performance jump.
So, if you are running low on cash, you might want to consider other brands. But, if your budget is a bit flexible, you should consider the new Samsung 870 QVO SSD. The drive is still not recommended for heavy workstations but it should serve fine for casual users and gamers.
