Samsung 870 EVO Review – Introduction

Summarized

Those in need of a fast SATA SSD will not be disappointed by the 870 EVO series. At a time when SATA drives can be regarded as mature and almost fully developed, Samsung has nevertheless managed to squeeze extra performance from its drives. Obviously, the interface is still the bottleneck and those who have an M.2 slot for NVMe drives would do much better to buy such a drive; even the slowest NVMe budget drive is faster than a SATA drive. However, anyone who is bound to the SATA interface, or who needs lower power consumption, will buy the fastest 2.5 “drive so far with the 870 EVO, but it is by no means cheap.

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Samsung has also introduced the 870 EVO drives following its 870 QVO series of SATA drives. Where the QVO series should primarily offer as much storage capacity at a low price as possible, the EVO drives would be suitable for the mainstream market as standard SSDs. For the higher segment of the SATA market, there is still the PRO series from the South Korean manufacturer.

The big question, however, is whether you still need such segmentation in a continuously shrinking storage market. After all, anyone who buys a SATA drive usually just wants as much storage as possible. After all, the bottleneck of the SATA interface, 600MB / s maximum, is a hard limit. If you want a fast SSD, then you will really have to switch to an NVMe drive.

So why is Samsung releasing an EVO version of the 870 generation? Could it be because qlc memory has an inherently shorter lifespan, due to the higher voltages that must be held for longer periods of time compared to tlc-nand to write data? Does Samsung simply choose to offer customers a choice? Or is there really a noticeable performance difference between the 870 QVO and 870 EVO series, despite the common bottleneck imposed by the SATA interface?

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