The Samsung 870 EVO (1TB & 4TB) Review: Does the World Need Premium SATA SSDs?
by Billy Tallis on February 17, 2021 8:00 AM ESTConclusion
The Samsung 870 EVO is a new SATA SSD in a market where all the interesting action is centered around NVMe SSDs. The 870 EVO is necessarily a low-key product refresh, but Samsung deserves praise for actually making this a new model instead of simply updating the parts used in the 860 EVO.
Given the limitations imposed by the SATA interface, our expectations for any new SATA SSD are mild. Performance can only improve in the corner cases and power efficiency cannot make big leaps without getting rid of the SATA performance limits. Prices can go down, but we've been seeing a lot of that even without a new generation of 3D NAND and SSD controller: the 860 EVO is currently selling for about a third of what the launch MSRPs were in 2018. The Samsung 870 EVO's newer 128L flash may be setting the stage for future price drops, but this early in Samsung's transition to 128L flash it's not bringing any savings to consumers.
Knowing that any changes the 870 EVO brings relative to its predecessor will be minor, the most important function of this review is simply to check whether Samsung remains at least consistent with the refresh. As far as we can tell, all seems to be well. Our testing didn't reveal any serious performance regressions, though several signs point to the 870 EVO's SLC caching being a bit less effective. Since this only shows up on tests that are deliberately more strenuous than any common consumer workload, we're not concerned by these results. Otherwise, the 870 EVO continues to be just about as fast as possible for a SATA SSD, and is a fine replacement for the 860 EVO.
It is a little disappointing that the 870 EVO doesn't bring further improvements to power efficiency. Since the 860 EVO's launch, SK hynix has raised the bar for consumer SSD efficiency in both the SATA and NVMe market segments, but Samsung is not challenging that leadership with their recent launches.
Widespread adoption of NVMe in the consumer space means the role of SATA SSDs is shifting and shrinking. There's no longer any point in competing to offer the fastest SATA SSD, and not much reason to compete on write endurance when any workload that actually pushes the endurance limits of mainstream consumer SSDs would benefit greatly from NVMe performance. Most systems that are too old to support NVMe SSDs probably have more serious performance bottlenecks than storage performance. So the 870 EVO has to compete more in the role of secondary storage, providing extra capacity for things like an overflowing video game library. With game developers only just beginning to explore ways to make use of NVMe performance, most any mainstream SATA SSD will offer more than enough performance and endurance for this use case now and for the near future.
| 250 GB | 500 GB | 1 TB | 2 TB | 4 TB | |
| Samsung 870 EVO | $39.99 (16¢/GB) | $64.99 (13¢/GB) | $129.99 (13¢/GB) | $249.99 (12¢/GB) | $479.99 (12¢/GB) |
| Samsung 870 QVO | $109.99 (11¢/GB) | $218.00 (11¢/GB) | $411.77 (10¢/GB) | ||
| Samsung 860 EVO | $39.99 (16¢/GB) | $59.99 (12¢/GB) | $109.99 (11¢/GB) | $229.99 (11¢/GB) | $444.76 (11¢/GB) |
| Samsung 860 PRO | $68.80 (27¢/GB) | $99.99 (20¢/GB) | $199.99 (20¢/GB) | $379.99 (19¢/GB) | $729.99 (18¢/GB) |
| WD Blue 3D NAND | $40.48 (16¢/GB) | $59.99 (12¢/GB) | $97.99 (10¢/GB) | $199.99 (10¢/GB) | $442.99 (11¢/GB) |
| Crucial MX500 | $48.99 (20¢/GB) | $53.99 (11¢/GB) | $104.99 (10¢/GB) | $209.99 (10¢/GB) | |
| SK hynix Gold S31 | $43.99 (18¢/GB) | $56.99 (11¢/GB) | $104.99 (10¢/GB) | ||
| NVMe | |||||
| Samsung 970 EVO Plus | $59.99 (24¢/GB) | $79.99 (16¢/GB) | $164.99 (16¢/GB) | $320.44 (16¢/GB) | |
| SK hynix Gold P31 | $74.99 (15¢/GB) | $134.99 (13¢/GB) | |||
| Sabrent Rocket Q | $64.99 (13¢/GB) | $109.98 (11¢/GB) | $219.98 (11¢/GB) | $599.98 (15¢/GB) | |
| WD Blue SN550 | $42.99 (17¢/GB) | $59.99 (12¢/GB) | $109.99 (11¢/GB) | $224.99 (11¢/GB) | |
Now that its successor is out, the Samsung 860 EVO will eventually be going away, but it's likely to still be in stock with major retailers for at least several months, and with third-party sellers for much longer. For now, the 860 EVO is cheaper than the 870 EVO for all but the smallest capacity, and that makes the 860 the smarter buy. But as Samsung transitions more fab capacity to their 128L TLC, this situation will change. (The 860 EVO also manages to be priced quite well against the 870 QVO, which really should offer more than just $10 savings at 2TB.)
Other major brands like Western Digital, Crucial and SK hynix offer great SATA SSDs that are generally cheaper than Samsung's 870 EVO. Samsung's performance advantages are too slight to justify any significant price premium. I also don't think that Samsung's reputation for quality is so much stronger than these competitors that Samsung should be charging $25 more at 1TB and $40-50 more at 2TB compared to eg. Western Digital.
The decline of the SATA SSD market broadly will take at least a few more years. But Samsung's niche as the premium choice within the SATA SSD market is shrinking much more quickly. If you want to spend a bit more to get a nicer than average SSD, the obvious route it to spring for a decent NVMe SSD that at least offers the possibility of being noticeably faster. But if you just need another terabyte or two of good-enough storage in a system where space is getting tight, there area a variety of cost-effective models with similar performance that fit the bill.
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hansmuff - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
Especially the 4TB seems like a fantastic Games drive to me, really good performance at a great price.ekon - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
What (my) world needs is an absolutely rubbish but cheap high capacity SSD. As many cell levels as it takes.jarablue - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
I have 2 sata WD Blue 1 tb ssds for game installs. They work totally fine and load games fast as hell. SATA ssds are still on point for large game storage space.Spunjji - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
It'll be interesting to see if this changes along with software being developed for the new generation of consoles.Duncan Macdonald - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
It takes 10 gig ethernet to exceed the speed of SATA - the SATA limit of 600 MBytes/sec is 4800Mbits/sec - allowing for TCP/IP overhead even a 5GbE link can not carry data as fast as a SATA link.SATA is still the only effective way of increasing the internal storage of systems that have no free NVMe slots available.
Tomatotech - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Or a USB3 / USB-C drive taped / velcro’d somewhere in the PC case.Could contain either 2.5” HDD, or 2.5” SDD or a m.2 NVME SSD in a USB enclosure. I’ve done that a couple of times with small cases. Works perfectly fine especially with solid state media.
edzieba - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Cable-attached storage still has the massive advantage that you can connect more drives than you have board area for. A regular motherboard may have one m.2 slot, paying out the nose may net you two slots. Selling off a few organs may buy a halo board with 3 or more slots. Or you may need a bloated riser card and occupy as 16x slot (no go for ITX). Or... you can use the at least 4 SATA ports on even the most bargain basement board (with 8 being hardly uncommon) to stuff more capacity in as needed with ease.SATA Express was the right idea at the wrong time: a x1 or x2 PCIe interface to allow NVMe, with PHY fallback to SATA, and at entirely acceptable bandwidth for most uses (stick in an m.2 boot drive for OS and key applications) would be a perfect upgrade path for consumer SATA use. If it integrated power transport too (for SSD only, block mechanical drives with keying at the device end cable) it would simplify cable routing too. But that boat has probably sailed for good, unless enterprise just happens to adopt such a connector and drive architecture, which seems unlikely with density demands ever increasing. I don't think we'll see any new internal high bandwidth cabling standards other than PCIe link rate updates to the persistently high-priced OCuLink.
Tomatotech - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
For more internal storage, a USB3 / USB-C drive can be taped / velcro’d somewhere in the PC case.Could contain either 2.5” HDD, or 2.5” SDD or a m.2 NVME SSD in a USB enclosure. I’ve done that a couple of times with small cases. Works perfectly fine especially with solid state media.
abufrejoval - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
I remember experimenting with Compact Flash cards on PCMCIA and IDE adapters, trying to run Windows XP and Linux on them: Sure, there were no seeks, but at the time I didn’t understand the erase block issues yet and was just befuddled how some I/O just seemed so slow it had XP crash.When FusionIO came out with their first devices, I jumped on those and they were basically a precursor of NVMe, ouch, is it 13 years already?
I’ve celebrated SATA SSDs, still have a 160GB Postville under current in a firewall, that may last another 10 years. I lost count, but there may be 30-50 SATA SSD in the house, some still used as „boot stick“ with only 128GB, most 1/4 to 1TB, some with 2TB.
The only 4TB SSD here is actually a RAID-0 using 4x1TB, because I tend to have plenty of SATA ports left over in all these tower chassis, that used to house 3.5“ HDDs. The last system with 2.4 TB FusionIO card also still sports 4x 200GB Intel enterprise DC3700 MLC drives, just because that X99 board has 10 SATA ports, so why not use them in a RAID so vastly overprovisioned that it will never die?
Like those ancient HDDs, these SSDs move around between boxes, almost like the „Winchesters“ or removable hard disks in the old days (been around since PDP-11/34). I use carrier-less hot swap bays on all systems, SATA caddies on laptops or USB3/SATA cases, for their flexibility: Milliseconds saved on storage benchmarks don’t compare to productivty and not having to disassemble a workstation with a 3 slot GPU and giant fans for low-noise, just to switch to another OS is a real bonus!
Most of the time SATA-SSD really is quite simply fast enough. If not, it’s the architecture, stupid!
And some of the more agonizing waits, turn out to be not at all related to SATA vs. NVMe…
ARK Survival Evolved is one of my favorite games, because I play that with my kids. Its main downside is loading-time: It just takes ages and ages to launch! Sure, it has 200GB data with all these extra maps and extensions, but perhaps more importantly, it’s 100.ooo files.
I got really tired of waiting for those minutes it took to load that from HDDs, so I invested in one of those „giant“ 1TB (SATA) SSDs at the time… still took awhile to load, but the improvement was significant (less than one CMU or coffee mug unit). Now, since we all play the game, I tried to be smart and put it on the network in the 4TB JBOD/RAID0 I mentioned, and then upgraded to a 10Gbit network to match the performance.
Alas, the load times across the 10Gbit network were horrific! Far worse, than the single 2TB HDD I had used in the beginning.
Then one day I ran ARK on Linux, within a larger experiment on the quality of Linux gaming. I didn’t have a big enough SSD around to store the game data, so instead I used one of those 2TB -WD HDD hunks from 15 years back, that just refuse to fail.
And then I almost fell of my chair, when ARK launched faster off that HDD than I had ever even see it launch from an NVMe drive (yes, of course, I had to have some of those, too).
Long story slightly abbreviated, the annoyingly slow ARK launches were never a storage issue, but a Windows file access overhead issue. Linux truly put Windows to shame that day! It managed to load those tens of thousands of files ARK required much faster from a HDD, than Windows needed on NVMe storage, and way, way, WAY faster than Windows (10Gbit) networking from a SATA-SSD RAID0.
Now, Windows and Windows 10Gbit networking isn’t always and by-default orders of magnitude slower than Linux. At least not, when you’re dealing with a few large files. But when your game (or application) happens to use 100.ooo small files instead of 10 big ones, be advised to test the OS before you blame it on the storage!
The general protocol and latency overhead of SATA vs. (PCIe)NVMe is no doubt significant.
As are the benefits of a well established form factor with all those ports and enclosures I already own, and the flexibilty I learned to rely on. Dogma rarely helps and I find myself buying SATA-SSD over NVMe, once the default system boot storage requirements for every box have already been filled (with NVMe, if capable). Mostly because a) SATA SSD are really fast enough already (real bottlenecks are architecture) and b) because aggregating those lower capacity NVMe sticks into RAID0 to extend their usability, is really, really, really expensive, at least so far, because those PCIe switches are so overpriced by Avago/Broadcomm, while SATA multiplexers are cheap and mostly built-into the PCH you already own.
zodiacfml - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
I don't mind SATA being limited since it is only huge file transfers are limited, not random performance or game/OS loading. The form factor needs improving though. A quick, cheap way to do that is to simply cut the 2.5" form factor to half or smaller since it will still leave a pair of mounting holes for screws.