1TB Samsung 870 EVO

Can Samsung teach old SATA new tricks?

- JEREMY LAIRD

IS THERE ANYTHING left in the tank when it comes to solid-state drives based on ye olde SATA interface? It’s a reasonable question, what with the obvious limitations of what is a positively antiquated interface.

After all, the latest M.2 PCI Express Gen-4 drives have around 8GB/s of theoretical bandwidth to play with. SATA is pegged at a mere 600MB/s. That’s just raw bandwidth. SATA also makes do with an elderly control protocol called AHCI, which was conceived with spinning magnetic platters, not NAND memory chips, in mind. The latest M.2 drives run the solid-state-optimized NVMe protocol.

All of that probably explains the roughly three-year interval between the new Samsung 870 EVO and its 860 EVO predecessor. In between, we’ve had the 870 QVO, of course. But as its name implied, the QVO is based on quad-level QLC NAND memory chips, which come with some significant limitations.

The new 870 EVO, by contrast, sticks with faster and more expensive TLC triple-level cells. And yet the question remains: does SATA have anything more to offer? On paper, the new 870 EVO has Samsung’s latest 128-layer TLC memory chips. It also packs the latest Samsung MKX SATA controller, as first seen in the 870 QVO. Elsewhere, there isn’t evidence of dramatic change. You still get 1GB of cache memory on this 1TB model, and just like the 860 EVO, the range goes all the way to 4TB.

BARKING UP THE WRONG TREE?