The Samsung 860 QVO (1TB, 4TB) SSD Review: First Consumer SATA QLC
by Billy Tallis on November 27, 2018 11:20 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer
The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
The 1TB Samsung 860 QVO does not handle The Destroyer very well, with an average data rate that is slightly slower than the DRAMless TLC drive. By comparison, the NVMe QLC drives from Intel and Micron are only slightly slower than the 860 EVO and MX500.
The QLC drives in general stand out more when looking at latency metrics than throughput, and especially when looking at 99th percentile latencies. The 1TB 860 QVO comes in last place for both average and 99th percentile latency, and all three QLC drives have worse 99th percentile latency than the DRAMless TLC drive.
The average read and write latencies of the 860 QVO are both only slightly worse than the DRAMless TLC SSD. The NVMe QLC drives are slightly faster than the mainstream SATA drives for read latency but fall behind in average write latency.
The 860 QVO actually doesn't come in last place for 99th percentile write latency, and in fact scores far better than the DRAMless TLC drive. However, the QLC drives are all still far worse off than the mainstream TLC SATA drives.
With low performance dragging out the test to a far longer duration, it's no surprise that the QLC drives all use much more energy over the course of The Destroyer than most SATA drives. The DRAMless Toshiba TR200 is an impressive exception that manages to be very efficient despite its low overall performance.
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Morawka - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
I just had 2 Samsung QLC 3 bit drives die this year alone. They were less than 1.5 year old. I'm never buying Samsung's EVO line again. It will be Pro from here on out. 4 bit drives will fail even faster.Makaveli - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
Which model evo's were those Morawka?And how many writes did they see? what kind of environment did you have them in?
stephenbrooks - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
I was starting to get excited about 2TB for $300 but then I looked up 2TB HDDs and they're about $60. Still a huge price differential especially as I usually want at least one extra drive for nightly backups, although perhaps the backup drive could be the HDD?Lolimaster - Thursday, November 29, 2018 - link
Even with the right capacities for a QLC price is similar or worse than current TLC.Samsunf 860 EVO 1TB $127
For QLC to make sense it should HALF of a TLC else is a ripoff.
s.yu - Friday, November 30, 2018 - link
What's the point of trying to pronounce it? It's just Q-V-O!araczynski - Friday, November 30, 2018 - link
so basically next black friday these should be half price and the 4tb might be worthy of consideration as a Steam drive.thomas-hrb - Friday, November 30, 2018 - link
$149.99 launch price is encouraging even if it is currently more than the 860evo. The 860evo launched for over $300 (closer to $330) and is now $139. If the qvo follows this pattern we can look forward to sub $65 for the 1tb qvo and maybe even $250 for 4tb.Ankou - Friday, November 30, 2018 - link
I think these QLC drives are a bad idea especially in the way they're being marketed. I'm not even talking about performance, the speed reduction I could live with. However, they're orders of magnitude worse in P/E cycles, retention, and endurance. These manufacturers know this and they're preying on the lack of education and focusing on price. Even so far as advertising these drives (this one in particular) as using 4 bit MLC memory (which 4 bit MLC is *always* QLC) implying that it is on safer MLC memory:https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-electronic...
That is completely a scummy marketing/PR way of doing business.
s.yu - Saturday, December 1, 2018 - link
The fundamental issue is that 2-bit MLC should have been accurately named DLC in the first place, it's not like somebody's gonna mix that up with downloadable content.0ldman79 - Saturday, December 15, 2018 - link
Could we get some numbers from some mechanical drives, WD or Seagate 1TB or 2TB, in comparison to the slower QLC drives?I'd like to see how they hold up against the QLC in random and sustained reads/writes. The latency might be the deciding factor even though I've got some mechanical drives that can beat them on sustained reads/writes.