King of Consumer Solid State Storage: Amazon Lists 8 TB Samsung 870 QVO-Series SATA III SSD

[Raevenlord]

For users that want to fully migrate their HDD storage towards a speedier SSD-option, Samsung's QVO series has usually been one of the more interesting prospects. Built solely with the intention of offering some of the best performance/$ metrics in the SSD storage space, the QVO series keeps Samsung's quality track record when it comes to NAND production but aims to reduce pricing as much as possible.

Amazon has now listed an 8 TB, consumer-available Samsung 870 QVO SSD. This SSD won't win any speed contests: it's built on the 2.5" form-factor and features a SATA III interface, but then again, this isn't meant to be used as users' fastest storage solution - it's meant to replace high-capacity HDDs while offering a notable performance improvement. It's very likely the QVO 870 is using Samsung's QLC (quad level cell) 3D V-NAND tech - which is still fine for most use-cases where you'll be mostly reading from the disc (and honestly, it's likely that most users would never even see performance degradation over the lifetime of the SSD, should they have a typical usage scenario). The 8 TB Samsung 870 QVO is currently listed on Amazon for a relatively steep $899.99 - which still amounts to some 11 cents per GB, so not a bad deal at all. Remember that pricing is currently slightly on the high side following the COVID-19 pandemic, though.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[QUANTUMPHYSICS]

This is fantastic. It's really good to see SSD prices coming down.

Too many people get wrapped up on the potential maximum speed. I personally have no problem with Samsung QVO in my gaming laptop or Cruxial's MX 500.

My only problem is that my laptop has two M.2 slots and one Sata which means there's a limit to how much SSD storage I can have, unlike my desktop that can easily take up to 8 Sata SSD.

8TB for $899 is actually a great deal...and Samsung still has 4TB QVO on the market less than $500.


I can definitely see myself buying one of these in the near future. I have five x 2TB Crucial MX500, I currently have less than 4TB in use, and I'd be able to migrate everything to just one of these and then backup a clone of my data and OS to a standard HDD. I always backup. I used to have a lot of Sandisks and I consolidated them into my Crucials.

When storage gets cheaper I always buy a bigger drive so I never have to worry about drive failures.

My STEAM games, DCS World add ons and Microsoft Flight Simulator are gonna eat up a lot of my space.

 

[Assimilator]

Of course it's using QLC... the QVO series are all QLC drives. What's interesting is the model number: the current QVO series is model 860, this is 870 which likely implies a new or improved controller.

Problem is that in terms of $/GB, the 1TB models are streets ahead since the higher-capacity SKUs are low-margin parts. So if you really want 8TB of SSD storage, it's cheaper to buy 8x 1TB drives than this single drive. It's getting better (last year at this time 512GB would have been the sweet spot) but nowhere near fast enough for me.

 

[Object55]

I did a research, sort of, yesterday. That Samsung drives come down in price in a year and 3 month period and then they stay around that price for awhile.

So if this drive is launching 2020. August then optimal price when to buy this would Black Friday 2021.

You are welcome

 

[bonehead123]

Now gimme this in a m.2 drive for $800 and I will be all over it.... hahahaha

 

[fynxer]

When 1TB comes down to around $60 and 8TB to $500 the new SSD era will begin.

 

[Vayra86]

Of course it's using QLC... the QVO series are all QLC drives. What's interesting is the model number: the current QVO series is model 860, this is 870 which likely implies a new or improved controller.

Problem is that in terms of $/GB, the 1TB models are streets ahead since the higher-capacity SKUs are low-margin parts. So if you really want 8TB of SSD storage, it's cheaper to buy 8x 1TB drives than this single drive. It's getting better (last year at this time 512GB would have been the sweet spot) but nowhere near fast enough for me.

Provided you have all those SATA's available for it... That I think is the trigger to go bigger. After all, having it all on one drive is also a single point of failure which in storage isn't always nice.

 

[Assimilator]

Provided you have all those SATA's available for it... That I think is the trigger to go bigger. After all, having it all on one drive is also a single point of failure which in storage isn't always nice.

Thankfully SSDs are far more reliable than mechanical HDDs. They generally either work out of the box, or not. And they don't die when knocked over.

 

[Nater]

Of course it's using QLC... the QVO series are all QLC drives. What's interesting is the model number: the current QVO series is model 860, this is 870 which likely implies a new or improved controller.

Problem is that in terms of $/GB, the 1TB models are streets ahead since the higher-capacity SKUs are low-margin parts. So if you really want 8TB of SSD storage, it's cheaper to buy 8x 1TB drives than this single drive. It's getting better (last year at this time 512GB would have been the sweet spot) but nowhere near fast enough for me.

You maths don't work out for me.
Samsung QVO 1TB is $130 at Amazon right now. x8 = $1040. You save $140 buying this drive vs getting 8x1TB drives. Let alone, who has 8 spare SATA ports?

 

[silentbogo]

Price is good. Just a tad over $100/TB. The only thing that concerns me is warranty. 860QVO only comes with 3-year coverage, just like low-end SSDs. Even 660p with much more intensive use cases still has 5 years. If this 8TB 870QVO only has 3-year coverage, it may discourage many people from opting-in on high capacity while sacrificing warranty (let's be honest, 8TB SSD, even at $100/TB, is a long-term purchase).
Also, I'm a bit confused... I thought 870QVO was supposed to launch at the end of june, while 8TB model was not up 'till end of August?...

 

[Assimilator]

You maths don't work out for me.
Samsung QVO 1TB is $130 at Amazon right now. x8 = $1040. You save $140 buying this drive vs getting 8x1TB drives. Let alone, who has 8 spare SATA ports?

Sorry, I was using UK prices.

1TB 860 QVO is 98 pounds at Amazon UK currently. Due to various taxes, 1 pound = 1 dollar for electronics in the UK, so the 8TB model should hit at around 899 pounds. At which price it would be more expensive than eight (actually nine) 1TB 860 QVOs.

 

[tomc100]

$900 for 8 tb ssd is actually pretty darn good.

 

[spectatorx]

8TB ssd with QLC chips? No thx, literally 8TB hdd still is better for storing data: faster than QLC, especially when moving larger portions of data and in case of failure you can recover data from hdd, from ssd you can't recover any data in any way. Yes, making backups is important but having a drive with ability to restore data is also important, from ssd you can't recover data, from hdd you can easily recover data even at home, in the worst case in dedicated lab. With ssd even dedicated labs (i mean companies like ontrack and similar) will not help you.

 

[utmode]

Hopefully someone will do longterm data retention test on this high capacity QLC drive.

 

[Metroid]

although still expensive, the same 8tb hard drive is around $200, so this at $900 is not bad at all.

 

[Ashtr1x]

Still to expensive for the QLC technology even. I'm happy with the WD REDs for much cheaper storage for all the movies and archiving. 2.5" SATA SSDs are the best always, these M.2 NVMe drives need passive cooling or some sort of air flow, esp in a laptop/ high end desktop replacement machines - Sager. Else they get cooked (Area51M / Alienware new BGA systems), and also 2.5" SATAs stay cool also in a desktop chassis they will run even more cool, unfortunately, there's no MLC SATA 2.5" SSDs except Samsung, and that 860 Pro 4TB is the last, I hope they make them more and market speaks so apparently with the next gen garbage console NVMe will gain even more popularity so that will be the one where most money will be put into for R&D and new products.

Even so only Samsung makes MLC tech NVMe, unfortunately it's still 1TB 970 Pro, the 980 Pro will probably also release with MLC with gen4 and 1TB, at 6.xGbps but we need higher capacities and since all the brands from Gigabyte to damned HP are making them, I don't think Samsung will continue it's superb MLC technology for more time. My plan is to keep my current machine run for more than a decade, just to enjoy the good old Win7/8.1 and old pozz free games with no DRM BS, bring these SATA SSDs more so that we can install all games into them and enjoy lol.

 

[lexluthermiester]

For a non-boot/OS drive that does mass storage, QLC isn't a severe problem. However as a boot/OS drive, not a freaken chance. QLC's durability is unacceptably low for such a purpose. For boot drives I still don't settle for anything less than MLC, but at least TLC is good enough. That price though. One can get 4 or 5 12TB+ 7200RPM HDD's for that $900, and they will last a lot longer...

The indutry is going to need to come up with a breakthrough in both durability and capacity before it will truly replace HDD's. Perhaps a whole type of memory storage...

 

[Kapone33]

8TB ssd with QLC chips? No thx, literally 8TB hdd still is better for storing data: faster than QLC, especially when moving larger portions of data and in case of failure you can recover data from hdd, from ssd you can't recover any data in any way. Yes, making backups is important but having a drive with ability to restore data is also important, from ssd you can't recover data, from hdd you can easily recover data even at home, in the worst case in dedicated lab. With ssd even dedicated labs (i mean companies like ontrack and similar) will not help you.

What planet do you live on that thinks that a QLC based SSD is slower than a HDD? Even if it gives you 300 Mb/s the QD32 4K numbers would be embaressing on a HDD vs a QLC SSD.

 

[cucker tarlson]

What planet do you live on that thinks that a QLC based SSD is slower than a HDD? Even if it gives you 300 Mb/s the QD32 4K numbers would be embaressing on a HDD vs a QLC SSD.

for pure qlc testing - it's slow.
but you're not gonna run out of cache with 8tb and in that situation it craps all over hdds

 

[dir_d]

These drives can bring back Raid5 or Raidz1 if the price of QLC keeps going down.

 

[Octavean]

If it were suitable for a RAID array I would consider something like this. Unfortunately, not at that price even if it were indeed a good price at the moment.

I would need 10 to 12 8TB SSD drives so its still way too expensive. When such SSD drives of this density (8TB) hit ~$200 to ~$300 USD then it becomes feasible but for now I'd buy ~10TB to ~16TB NAS or enterprise HDDs and hope to speed them up with SSD cache drives.

 

[QUANTUMPHYSICS]

What planet do you live on that thinks that a QLC based SSD is slower than a HDD? Even if it gives you 300 Mb/s the QD32 4K numbers would be embaressing on a HDD vs a QLC SSD.

I'll never understand these people.

They act as if they are sitting in front of their computer running benchmarks when they move a mass of files from one place to another.

If I needed to migrate 500GB of Data, I start the process, get up and go do something productive. I come back...it's done.
Same goes for editing a 4K or 8K video.


RELIABILITY and CAPACITY is more important than potential maximum speeds.

Furthermore, there is absolutely NO WAY any modern SSD is slower than any modern HDD. It's basic physics.

 

[ObiFrost]

Tap me with a bat when there is TLC version, I ain't risking with limited QLC cache for main applications, fine for mass storage, even though it's still a year or something off, before we see a wave of next-gen games being hard coded around SSD performance.

 

[Octavean]

One should always assume a drive will fail. The use of the 3-2-1 backup strategy is advisable. Some the comments here are concerning because they suggest that a drive failure is unthinkable and something that one doesn't or shouldn't prepare for.

No one want's a hardware failure to be sure but presumably the data is primarily what is important.

 

[Mamya3084]

I have 3 X WD 2tb 3d nand flash drives in raid 0 and have a 5 year warranty and faster speed. That cost was about $600. (Don't worry, I have a NAS raid 5 back-up)
Although the larger capacity is nice, it won't cut it with such a short warranty.