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 - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The Samsung 860 QVO has no trouble with the Light test when it is run on an empty drive, and the full-drive performance loss is not too bad: the 1TB 860 QVO remains ahead of the DRAMless TLC drive even when the drives are full.
The average and 99th percentile latency scores from the 860 QVO are no problem when the test is run on a full drive. They're substantially higher when the drives are full, but the latency is better-controlled than on the Intel/Micron QLC drives.
The average read and write latency scores from the 860 QVO are clearly different from the TLC drives for the full-drive test runs, but they don't stand out as significantly worse than what we've seen from some of the slower TLC drives.
The 99th percentile read latency on the 860 QVO is a sore spot when the drive is full, but the 99th percentile write latency doesn't get too far out of control, especially compared to the other two QLC drives.
All of the QLC drives use more energy than the TLC drives during the Light test, and especially when the drives are full and have more background work to do.
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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.