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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Lolimaster - Thursday, November 29, 2018 - link
SSHD's shoudl use optane, like 32GB.Lolimaster - Thursday, November 29, 2018 - link
And let you manually mirror files that you want accelerated.h0007h - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
It's even slower than HDD。 Why not buy a regular HDD with an Optane? That's much cheaper.piroroadkill - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
It seems to me like the move from TLC to QLC is not just a bit worse, but monumentally so. QLC would have to be a LOT cheaper than TLC to warrant a purchase, not just a bit.piroroadkill - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
"The current street prices for the 860 EVO are lower than the 860 QVO for two out of three capacities, and that's comparing against one of the best SATA SSDs out there."Which makes QLC as a worthless product. I don't think 25% off the cheapest TLC SSDs would be enough, because it seems even worse than that.
rpg1966 - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
Right, because these at-introduction prices will never fall, just like with every other product in the history of the universe.Kamgusta - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
CONCLUSIONS: Current QLC drives are trash.vortmax2 - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
In the end, it's good to see this quad tech coming to the consumers. We're now within striking distance for true HDD to SSD storage/mirror conversion. In the next year or two, pricing will lower enough for many to make the leap.nwarawa - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
YES! Finally! Samsung GETS it! 512GB QLC models should not exist. Even 512GB models with current 3D TLC don't reach the parallelism performance sweet spot. The 2TB model, when priced right, should all but eliminate the case for consumer 2.5in HDDs.Kaihekoa - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
Pretty underwhelming performance and too expensive. I'd buy at 10 centers/GB.