Final Thoughts
QLC-based solid state drives are typically “entry-level” or “budget” drives. Mainly marketed as a replacement for a normal hard drive. In that sense the Samsung QVO (like another other SATA-based SSD) is a great replacement for your typical hard drive. The sequential performance is going to be anywhere from 2-3x faster than that standard hard drive. Which will definitely be noticeable with you are switching our your OS drive or game drive.
Now if you are doing any heavy writes to the drive you’ll see a massive drop in performance. Once that cache is exhausted write performance drops down to around 80 MB/s, which is very slow. I can’t imagine if you plan on doing a lot of writes you would even be considering a QLC-based drive, but the extended write performance on this drive is pretty bad.
So we have some very nice sequential performance and like most drives extended write performance is bad. So the saving grace of this drive should be an aggressive price right? Sadly, that is not the case at all. The 1TB version of the drive is currently selling for $109.99 at our favorite online retailer and as a reminder this drive only has a 3-year warranty. Samsung’s own SSD 860 EVO 1TB is $99 and it has similar performance, TLC NAND, and a 5-year warranty. Samsung also has their 970 EVO NVMe drive for only $20 more ($129.99), which is much faster and also has a 5-year warranty. Sabrent’s Rocket Q NVMe SSD is also $119 and again has a 5-year warranty. Pricing for the 1TB version of this drive just does not make sense and there are far better SATA and M.2 NVMe options out there.
This is one of the few drives available in an 8TB version, making it a viable replacement for a high-capacity hard drive. But the 8TB version will set you back $892.64.
At the end of the day I thought this drive was going to be a nice entry-level SATA-based solid state drive and it performs as expected, but it is just not priced right for it to really be considered. Overall ThinkComputers give the Samsung 870 QVO Solid State Drive a 7 out of 10 score.
Pros:
– Great sequential performance
– Available up to 8TB
Cons:
– Price
– SLC cache gets exhausted quickly
– Very low write performance once SLC cache is exhausted
– Only a 3-year warranty
