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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nathanddrews - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Still leaps and bounds beyond 7200RPM hard drives, but not great either. If we could just get to SATA3 equivalent performance at this price/GB, it would be great. 4TB for that cheap is pretty awesome though, I might grab one if it goes on sale.Makaveli - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Your review conclusion was much easier on this drive than the Tech Report review.Basically buy a 860Evo this drive is trash is what I get when I read all the reviews on the net today. Only people that don't follow the industry will be suckered into buying these because of that attractive low price.
Like everything in this world you get what you pay for.
Billy Tallis - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
I didn't want to over-emphasize the price issue because I don't think that situation will last very long. Samsung may end up dropping prices before the QVO even hits the shelves, and within a few months I think it will be significantly cheaper than the EVO, which means it should also be cheaper than all the other mainstream TLC drives and the handful of high-capacity DRAMless TLC drives. Once the novelty wears off and the pricing settles down, I fully expect the QVO to end up being a very reasonable entry-level buy.hanselltc - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
It'll not only have to be significantly cheaper than the EVO series -- I think it'll have to compete with HDD arrays.The_Assimilator - Thursday, November 29, 2018 - link
This sort of forward-thinking bigger-picture non-knee-jerk reviewing is why I keep coming back to AnandTech. People can pan this drive and QLC all they want, but Samsung's gonna be laughing all the way to the bank once QLC starts eating HDDs' lunch, and then those same sites that trashed them will be calling them visionary.BTW Billy, please do keep us updated on the 4TB failures you saw - since that capacity is likely going to be the best in terms of cost/GB, a lot of people will be considering 4TB Samsung SSDs, and if there is a controller/firmware/NAND issue lurking it would be great to know about it beforehand.
AbRASiON - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Hi,I know it's an odd request but I don't follow reviews as much as I used to.
I'd love to see a couple of graphs on this chart, just showing perhaps a very early generation SSD or even a regular high end 7200RPM hard drive.
Scale is all but lost when you don't recognise the disks it's comparing against.
I know the 860/960 Evos are powerful, I can see this disk is much slower, but will it totally destroy a hard drive or Intel G2 160GB classic in all benchmarks? Etc
TekWiz - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Well sure it will destroy a hard drive! It's slower than the EVO but still is a pretty good SSD. It's aimed at people who want high capacity for as least money as possible. I bet if the list price is $150, it will probably end up costing about $20 less than an equivalent EVO.It's like comparing the PRO to the EVO, it's more expensive but has higher performance. But any of these quality SSD totally beat spinning disks particularly when it's not just sequential reads. In normal use, sequential reads are less common than the arm of the drive going back and forth over the surface reading blocks from all over the place, and you can hear it like a chattering sound, sometimes annoying. Those reads slow the drive down to a crawl usually. That's what makes the SSD so superior, there is no waste of time while a mechanical arm positions itself repetitively over various blocks on a spinning surface. On an SSD all the data is equally instantly available no matter where it exists in the cell matrix in the chips...
hanselltc - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
Why would I want these over a HDD though? Say, a SSHD.CheapSushi - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
Honestly I'd like for SSHDs to get a reboot, especially with this higher capacity QLC that also acts like SLC when needed. The current SSHDs I think have a max of 8GB of NAND and 2TB (I think) of platter. I'd love to see maybe 128GB of NAND and 4TB or 5TB of platter, at least for 2.5" form factor.Darcey R. Epperly - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
And a reserved area guaranteed to be NAND, the rest for caching.