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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0ldman79 - Saturday, December 15, 2018 - link
I found some answers to that question on the Bench.https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2339?vs=22...
Load time, file copy times, etc, I guess more day to day testing would be appreciated. The spinner does a decent job on the BAPCo tests.
I'm wondering if the QLC will really improve my load times vs my 2TB mechanical drive that sustains nearly 200MBps read speeds in practice.
ewitte - Thursday, March 28, 2019 - link
Who in their right mind would purchase a QVO drive when the EVO is similarly priced? These drives perform poorly and have horrible longevity. 160MB/s writes after the cache!!!! I will not even touch the smaller EVO drives because the write speed is so low (500GB is ok but 1TB is so affordable now it is my minimum).Sanmayce - Friday, March 29, 2019 - link
Anand, please consider debunking the myth of data retention being limited to a few months.Really, where this myth originates from, f.e. if one buys QVO for backups what is the safe-time-between-losing-data?
My proposal is to fill the drive with 900GB 7z archive and test the integrity after, say, 6 months.
I myself am planning to buy the 1TB QVO just to find how durable it is under superheavy REAL-WORLD random read/writes - QD1. By the way, you are using 16GB spans in your tests, but the SLC is bigger than that, don't you see a problem?
bobhumplick - Thursday, May 16, 2019 - link
so if the intel 660p and the smasung qvo are the same price which one do you get?praveenvj - Friday, July 26, 2019 - link
Now that price has dropped to $400 for 4TB, does this make sense compared to EVO for daily driver PC?southleft - Monday, August 19, 2019 - link
Here we are about 9 months later - August 2019 - and the price of Intel's 660p 1TB model has dropped by 50% when it's on sale. So, for $85 - $95 you can get an NVMe drive with, say, 750GB of usable capacity and it will blow all of these SATA SSDs out of the water. In other words, if you don't fill the drive over about 75% full you'll have a smokin' fast rig.problemchild - Wednesday, October 23, 2019 - link
As a professional many comments here disregard what these drives are intended for and for obvius reasons you wouldn't want to buy them for a server array or high availability applications. Samsung has entered a product which is now competing with lower priced product \ brands. For the average consumer looking for a Samsung branded drive to be used as a basic storage drive for documents, photos, music and game storage it makes a lot of sense. Admittedly IMHO buying a 2TB SSD for general storage use at the $200 mark is extreme in comparison to $80 for a spinner but for some users but for gamers it may be worth the price to use as game storage drive.Scour - Sunday, June 28, 2020 - link
Question: If the SLC-cache is full, the speed drops, that´s clear. But what happened if the SSD have a power loss directly after the data-writing ends? Is all Data still accessable on the SSD (because data still have to be copied from the SLC-cache to the QLC)?leexgx - Thursday, August 6, 2020 - link
did they ever issue a firmware update with the 4TB QVO, EVO and Pro samsung ssds been problematic sometimes not working