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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Impulses - Thursday, November 29, 2018 - link
Bleh, googling revealed that WAS on Amazon... It never triggered my price alerts, hrm, even tho it's definitely showing on Camelcamel's price history now, weird. Maybe I glossed over it entirely, oh well.The_Assimilator - Thursday, November 29, 2018 - link
https://www.pcgamer.com/crucials-2tb-mx500-ssd-is-...hojnikb - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
@BillyCan you do a data retention test ? Like writing the drive with data (H2testw seems to be the pick of the bunch) and disconnecting it. I'm interested how data retention holds up over time.
JoeyJoJo123 - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Don't use SSDs for cold storage. Testing this is absurdly stupid and a waste of a reviewers time.Disconnect drive for 10 days: Replug it in and verify data's still all there. Yep.
Disconnect drive for 15 days: Replug it in and verify data's still all there. Yep.
Disconnect drive for 20 days: Replug it in and verify data's still all there. Yep.
(We're already at 45 days, or 1.5 months, and chances are the data's still all there, are you getting how and why this kind of testing is stupid?)
By the time you get to sufficiently long enough time periods to see some change in data you'd have wasted over a year trying to find a time period (within 5 days) where you know the drive will start losing data. This is just as absurd as asking reviewers to test NAND flash endurance by hammering the drive 24/7 for years until it dies. By the time it DOES die something better will have already arrived on the market. And disregarding all that, testing with a sample size of ONE is not indicative of any relevant performance characteristics for your ONE drive.
If you want to use cold storage backups, either use a mechanical hard drive, a tape drive, or invest in cloud storage and encrypt your data before uploading it.
Testing the cold storage capabilities of a sample size of ONE QLC SSD does nothing but prove that it's a less satisfactory use case for the technology than using a mechanical hard drive.
HollyDOL - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
I _think_ you can find Google or Facebook statistics on their SSDs, error rate etc. in representative volumes. But ofc it is enterprise grade hardware.hojnikb - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
Not for QLC.hojnikb - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
You're not thinking very far. As QLC is very cheap, it will be used in likes of flash drives, SD cards and portable SSDs. With these, it's not expected for them to be powerred at all time and in the case of sd cards and flash drives, it's not likely controller would do any kind of data rewritting.So this is very much a relavant test, that might give us ideas on how it performs. And no, you don't have to wait a year to see something; data curruption can be presented a lot sooner if from of read error and slower read speed in general. A more extreme approach is to heat the drive, which accelarates the process.
eddieobscurant - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Horrible performance by samsung 64 layer qlc nand. Way slower than intel's/micron's . Especially the 4k random reads are slower than my first ssd 10 years ago, the intel x-25m.In order for samsung 860 qvo to make sense, it should be priced below 0.10$/gb
stargazera5 - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Great, now that we have QLC down, we can move on to PLC (5 bits per cell) and 1 drive write per week.CheapSushi - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
And from the current trend, it still won't be much cheaper. =P