Samsung 870 QVO SATA 4 TB SSD

[80251]

I know this is a slow QLC SSD, but at least it has 4 GiB of LPDDR4 L1 cache and a 78 GiB SLC 2nd level cache. It's meant to replace my DT01ACA200 Toshiba 2 TiB 7200 RPM HDD which began serenading me with the click of death until it mercifully died after only writing some 5.7TiB of data and 4 years of life. It had about 1.6 TiB of data (games, music, programs, pictures, data) on it.

I have a few questions about the Samsung 870 QVO 4 TB

1. would a 28% overprovisioning help with the dreaded loss in write speeds?

2. even though it's write speeds are abysmal, they're still significantly better than the Toshiba 2 TiB HDD it's replacing right?

3. would it be worth it to get a small, fast, NVME, M.2 SSD to cache the slow Samsung 870 QVO?

4. if yes to 3, would one of the small, ultra-fast optane SSD's be the way to go? What capacity should I be looking at?

 

[prtskg]

If you are ready to invest in optane, why not buy 4TB TLC SSD?

 

[cvaldes]

Optane is expensive and dead.

The best approach in using the Samsung 870 QVO 4TB 2.5" SSD is to avoid frequent writing of large amounts of data. You'll be more satisfied with its performance if you consider it a mostly-read device for content storage (games, music, movies, photos, etc.) rather than something you'll be writing to frequently in large amounts.

 

[lexluthermiester]

1. would a 28% overprovisioning help with the dreaded loss in write speeds?

That would be more that you need. 12% would be more than enough for a 4TB drive.

2. even though it's write speeds are abysmal, they're still significantly better than the Toshiba 2 TiB HDD it's replacing right?

True.

3. would it be worth it to get a small, fast, NVME, M.2 SSD to cache the slow Samsung 870 QVO?

No. The performance as a secondary storage drive will be more than sufficient.

 

[newtekie1]

1. would a 28% overprovisioning help with the dreaded loss in write speeds?

If you are talking about leaving an unallocated portion of the drive as overprovisioning, then it won't help at all with the write speed issue of a QLC drive.

2. even though it's write speeds are abysmal, they're still significantly better than the Toshiba 2 TiB HDD it's replacing right?

Probably not what I would call significantly, but it will likely be better. The 4TB QVO writes to the QLC directly at about 200MB/s. There are some hard drives on the market that can match that, I'm not sure if your old Toshiba was one of them.

3. would it be worth it to get a small, fast, NVME, M.2 SSD to cache the slow Samsung 870 QVO?

No. The QVO will work just fine by itself. It's not worth wasting the money on a M.2 cache drive. If you are going to do that, just buy a better 2.5" drive instead of the QVO. IMO, the only time SSD caching makes sense is if you are caching a HDD.

 

[chrcoluk]

I am no fan of QLC, but to answer your questions.

Writing to QLC natively is slower, slower than modern hdd's, but the majority of the time if not all of time time the drive should be writing to the pSLC cache, which will comfortably out perform your old HDD.

A 78 gig pSLC cache seems quite small for a 4TB SSD though. So if you was doing something like transferring all your games at once to it, you might fill that cache during that operation, but once thats done, it will be moved to QLC in the background and the cache will be used again when it drops back to normal usage patterns.

Overprovisioning will help in longevity and to prevent the pSLC cache going down to its minimal size. It shouldnt have any affect on QLC/pSLC write speeds though. (keeping free space has same effect).

I dont think there is a need to buy a separate caching SSD for your described use case, read speeds will be performant, and games are primarily read based. Plus in your described use case writes will typically be going to pSLC which is performant.

 

[Toothless]

Might be worth noting the 870 EVO 4TB is only $10 than the QVO on Amazon today.

 

[80251]

@Toothless
I did consider the 870 Evo until I read about the failure rates for these SSD's being really bad, which is surprising considering it's a Samsung product. TPU has a whole thread on the issues with the 870 Evo and it's backed up by reviews for the 870 Evo on both newegg and amazon with many failures being reported (relative to other SATA SSD's).

Will the 870 QVO be at least faster in IOP's and sequential reads than my Toshiba HDD was? It'll be more reliable than a spinner right?

 

[Toothless]

@Toothless
I did consider the 870 Evo until I read about the failure rates for these SSD's being really bad, which is surprising considering it's a Samsung product. TPU has a whole thread on the issues with the 870 Evo and it's backed up by reviews for the 870 Evo on both newegg and amazon with many failures being reported (relative to other SATA SSD's).

Will the 870 QVO be at least faster in IOP's and sequential reads than my Toshiba HDD was? It'll be more reliable than a spinner right?

SSDs have a limited write endurance, and HDDs just have a "how long is this gonna spin the platter and wiggle the arm" type deal.

My 970 EVO is at like.. 375TBW or something and the write is destroyed. Still choochin'.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Will the 870 QVO be at least faster in IOP's and sequential reads than my Toshiba HDD was?

Should be. I have rarely seen an SSD not out perform an HDD. By how much is the question. You shouldn't worry about it.

It'll be more reliable than a spinner right?

That depends on many factors. Personally, I have rarely had a HDD fail. It happens once every decade and never fails to show signs of that failure, giving more than enough time to back up the data, if important. This includes 2.5" HDDs intended for mobile. But then again, I only buy quality drives. You seem to be doing your homework and finding a reliable drive shouldn't be difficult. You'll get much storage space bang for your buck with an HDD. Well cared for, HDDs can a do last a decade and often much more.

 

[80251]

@lexluthermiester

If I didn't have bad luck with hardware I wouldn't have any luck at all.

My Toshiba 2 TiB spinner was ~4 years old when it died (after writing only 5.7 TiB of data) and announced the fact through the click of death. No SMART statistics were failing when this happened and had no bad sectors and no reallocated sectors.

Then again, my Toshiba 2 TiB spinner did come back to life TWICE, to allow me to back up more data so I shouldn't complain. My one SSD failure (a Crucial MX500 250 GB SATA M.2) was total, absolute and without any warning whatsoever (i.e. no click of death). It disappeared from BIOS and device mangler.

I like Samsung because I have 4 of their SATA 850 Pros and none of them have ever given me any troubles at all.

 

[Toothless]

If your SSD is clicking, you got a whole different issue.

 

[lexluthermiester]

@lexluthermiester

If I didn't have bad luck with hardware I wouldn't have any luck at all.

My Toshiba 2 TiB was ~4 years old when it died (after writing only 5.7 TiB of data) and announced the fact through the click of death. No SMART statistics were failing when this happened and had no bad sectors and no reallocated sectors.

Then again, my Toshiba 2 TiB did come back to life TWICE, to allow me to back up more data so I shouldn't complain. My one SSD failure (a Crucial MX500 250 GB SATA M.2) was total, absolute and without any warning whatsoever (i.e. no click of death). It disappeared from BIOS and device mangler.

I like Samsung because I have 4 of their SATA 850 Pros and none of them have ever given me any troubles at all.

Perhaps WD would work better for you.

 

[80251]

I think outside of backup media I'm done with spinners.

 

[Shou Miko]

Perhaps WD would work better for you.

WD is a good choice I would go Purple or if you want to spend the money Gold.

Even I this time around went Seagate Exos the prices are really good and performance are wow for the bigger drives I got a 16TB.

 

[lexluthermiester]

I think outside of backup media I'm done with spinners.

Well, then you should expect to pay premium prices for smaller storage drives. For mass storage, HDD's are still the better buy.
However if you're sold on SSDs going forward, that 870 QVO will be good for many years. Buy with confidence.

 

[newtekie1]

Writing to QLC natively is slower, slower than modern hdd's

This statement is largely false. I think most people, at least on these forums, tend to believe this is true because of how horribly the 870 QVO 1TB performed in the review here. That drive definitely fits your description, since it drops to ~100MB/s when the pSLC cache runs out. And it also has a stupid small pSLC cache of only ~40GB. But that drive was crippled compared to other QLC drives, even higher capacity 870 QVO drives. The reason is that at 1TB of capacity, the drive only had a single QLC NAND chip to write to. And writing to just a single chip results in the terrible performance we saw in the review.

But the fact is that even the 2TB model, which has 2 chips that can be written to at the same time, doubles that speed to ~200MB/s when writing directly to the QLC. And it also doubles the pSLC cache size to ~80GB(which is still stupidly small). And there are plenty of other QLC drives that perform much better in writing. There are drives that have a full 1/4 of their capacity as pSLC. These drives can do ~250MB/s when writing directly to QLC. Which is probably, as worst, matching the fastest HDDs on the market today but in reality still beating most HDDs. And that's only if you manage to use up all the pSLC cache, which is a lot harder on the drives with actual reasonable amounts of pSLC.

 

[P4-630]

If your SSD is clicking, you got a whole different issue.

Wonder where the noise is coming from..

 

[chrcoluk]

This statement is largely false. I think most people, at least on these forums, tend to believe this is true because of how horribly the 870 QVO 1TB performed in the review here. That drive definitely fits your description, since it drops to ~100MB/s when the pSLC cache runs out. And it also has a stupid small pSLC cache of only ~40GB. But that drive was crippled compared to other QLC drives, even higher capacity 870 QVO drives. The reason is that at 1TB of capacity, the drive only had a single QLC NAND chip to write to. And writing to just a single chip results in the terrible performance we saw in the review.

But the fact is that even the 2TB model, which has 2 chips that can be written to at the same time, doubles that speed to ~200MB/s when writing directly to the QLC. And it also doubles the pSLC cache size to ~80GB(which is still stupidly small). And there are plenty of other QLC drives that perform much better in writing. There are drives that have a full 1/4 of their capacity as pSLC. These drives can do ~250MB/s when writing directly to QLC. Which is probably, as worst, matching the fastest HDDs on the market today but in reality still beating most HDDs. And that's only if you manage to use up all the pSLC cache, which is a lot harder on the drives with actual reasonable amounts of pSLC.

Ok not so bad then, I think regardless with his use case he should after copying the initial data over, only be writing to the pSLC anyway.

 

[bonehead123]

The last spinners I owned were WD Raptors (7 of them), and when I finally sold off the last one in 2017, it was over 11 years old and still running as well as it did on the day I first installed it, and the person I sold it to is still using it right now

That's probably why I only use WD's m.2's in all 5 of my rigs & also client builds now....

 

[80251]

The anandtech review of the Samsung 870 QVO 4 TB model showed the write speed dropping to 163 MB/s for the last 16 GB of capacity after writing to the rest of the SSD:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15887/the-samsung-870-qvo-1tb-4tb-ssd-review-qlc-refreshed/2

At least once all the data is transferred to the Samsung 870 QVO 4 TB it won't be so bad because I won't be writing more than tens of gigabytes at a time to it thereafter

 

[Wirko]

The anandtech review of the Samsung 870 QVO 4 TB model showed the write speed dropping to 163 MB/s for the last 16 GB of capacity after writing to the rest of the SSD:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15887/the-samsung-870-qvo-1tb-4tb-ssd-review-qlc-refreshed/2

At least once all the data is transferred to the Samsung 870 QVO 4 TB it won't be so bad because I won't be writing more than tens of gigabytes at a time to it thereafter

Not just for the last 16 GB but from the beginning to the end, except for the initial cached gigabytes. Look at the graph!

Anandtech pays special attention to the last 16 GB due to the effect that's barely visible in QLC drives (TPU review) but is very pronounced in many TLC drives (TPU review). That's when the drive needs to flush the pSLC cache while writing new data at the same time, so it becomes slower than slow. That apparently doesn't happen in Samsung QVO models but never mind, it's just a technical curiousity and really shouldn't affect real life operation.

 

[mb194dc]

The last spinners I owned were WD Raptors (7 of them), and when I finally sold off the last one in 2017, it was over 11 years old and still running as well as it did on the day I first installed it, and the person I sold it to is still using it right now

That's probably why I only use WD's m.2's in all 5 of my rigs & also client builds now....

I killed two WD 15k rpm SAS in a mail server, double disk failure actually, only one I've seen. Think having to write thousands of tiny files all the time got to them after 4 or 5 years.

Just took on a server owned used by others before that has 4 x Hynix SL308 250GB drives in it. All of them have 160TB written to them which is more than double endurance. Really a miracle they are still usable. Not sure how far they could be pushed further before failing.

 

[Wirko]

Just took on a server owned used by others before that has 4 x Hynix SL308 250GB drives in it. All of them have 160TB written to them which is more than double endurance. Really a miracle they are still usable. Not sure how far they could be pushed further before failing.

That's interesting. Can you check their SMART data to see how much life they think they have left?

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
Frankly I would avoid 870 series completely to many issues
Go western digital instead.

Black is always my preference but for data drive blue is fine to.