The Samsung 860 QVO (1TB, 4TB) SSD Review: First Consumer SATA QLC
by Billy Tallis on November 27, 2018 11:20 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
Neither capacity of the Samsung 860 QVO can keep pace with the mainstream TLC drives on the write-intensive Heavy test, but they both outperform the DRAMless TLC drive. The NVMe+QLC drives from Intel and Micron fare much better when the test is run on an empty drive, but when full they too fall behind the mainstream TLC SSDs.
The Samsung 860 QVOs have much worse latency scores than the mainstream TLC drives, and the 99th percentile latency is much worse than even the DRAMless TLC SSD. However, the Samsung QLC drives are a bit better than the Intel/Micron QLC drives at keeping latency under control when the test is run on a full drive.
The average read latencies from the Samsung 860 QVOs are only a bit higher than the mainstream TLC drives, but the average write latencies stand out as worse by at least a factor of two.
The 99th percentile read and write latency scores from the 860 QVOs are poor, but they at least avoid the horrific write QoS issues that the Toshiba TR200 shows, and are better than the full-drive run on the Crucial P1.
The Samsung 860 QVO uses substantially more energy over the course of the Heavy test than the other SATA drives, and more than the the NVMe QLC drives in most cases, too.
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Lolimaster - Thursday, November 29, 2018 - link
HDD's sweet spot for manufacturers is the 4TB and up, they can't really make them cheaper than $40-50 no matter the size, it got tons of physical moving parts, a big chunk of well crafted aluminum, special sealing, etc vs an SSD that is just nand and a plastic casing before at least you got a thin aluminum case.Glaurung - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Spinning drives aren't going away - capacities are still going up and spinning drives are still the best deal for extremely high capacity storage - like NAS and datacentre storage. That's unlikely to change any time soon. But the amount of storage that you're realistically going to want inside your computer? It's now affordable to go all SSD for your local internal storage.But storage inside your laptop has until now been a case of needing two drives, a fast SSD to boot off of and a slow HDD for your data. Or else pay a ton for a high capacity SSD, or make do with a small drive
Dr. Swag - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Selling an inferior SSD to the 860 evo for more! What a great ideaPaoDeTech - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Lower cost (QLC) higher capacity SSDs are very welcome. Is as simple as that. I read an interesting study that basically concludes that an SSD lifespan is usually limited by age not total writes. Interesting. Can anybody confirm or deny?hojnikb - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Not really. SSDs don't tend to die of old age or exhausted endurance (not in client workloads anyway) but rather random controller faulires and firmwar bugs.One considuration with such flash is data retention. As these are fairly large drives, they will be used for storage and hence this can become an issue.
PaoDeTech - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Here's the article: https://www.zdnet.com/article/ssd-reliability-in-t...hojnikb - Wednesday, November 28, 2018 - link
Quickly skimming the article, it does seem to suggest, that age has an effect on raw bit errors. What it doesn't include (not that i can find) is wheter drives were the same model and manufacturer.Older drives could be of inferior controllers and weaker firmware design which can't cope with bit errors as well.
spkay31 - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
Personally I think the Intel 660p NVMe SSD's offer a very nice price performance tradeoff when on sale. Yesterday an Intel 660p 1TB drive was on sale for $130. At around 1800Mbps it's ~ 3.5X faster than a SATA ssd and about 45% cheaper than a Samsung 970 EVO 1TB NVMe drive. OK, so it's 1800Mbps vs 3200Mbps but again for my uses that is certainly excellent speed improvement from a SATA ssd and I'm willing to accept some of the other shortcomings of QLC. My experience is that QLC is already a very reasonable value proposition for many applications.JoeyJoJo123 - Tuesday, November 27, 2018 - link
While I have nothing against the Intel 660p, not QLC, and I very much welcome these technologies, even considering black friday """deals""", I still don't think it has become price competitive (yet).I purchased an 860 EVO 1TB for $127 ($127 after tax/shipping), and then later an MX500 2TB for $209 ($229 after tax/shipping). (Bought the 860 EVO 1TB since the 2TB was $299 and therefore much more expensive in $/GB, and because I hadn't seen anything better by the time it was Saturday, but CyberMonday on Amazon brought the $209 MX500. I may or may not return the 860 EVO.)
Both of these drives are 3D TLC based, and still have their marginal sustained read/write advantages over 3D QLC. Given the (roughly) equivalent price between a 1TB 860 EVO 1TB and Intel 660p 1TB, I don't think it's unfair to say that the 860 EVO should be every customer's pick every single time (again, given these """deal""" prices).
As always, it'll take some time before newer technologies drop in prices and mature in overall value. I'm sure it'll happen for QLC drives, as they did with MLC and TLC before them, but it just hasn't happened quite yet.
Impulses - Thursday, November 29, 2018 - link
Wait what? The 2TB MX500 hit $209 this year? Was it a flash sale or something? I had price alerts set on it, the 860 EVO, and the WD Blue/SanDisk Ultra and the cheapest I saw for a 2TB was $255... Granted I was mostly looking at Amazon, where'd you score that deal?