Samsung SSD 870 QVO: Stupendous 8TB capacity SSD

SSDs are closing ground on hard drives in capacity per unit, albeit not in price per terabyte.

- JON L. JACOBI

The Samsung 870 QVO (‘Q’ as in 4-bit QLC), is our first look at a drive that will eventually ship with a whopping 8TB of NAND onboard. Announced June 30, this is the new top capacity available, superseding a still-new flock of 4TB models. Samsung sent us the 2TB version for testing. It’s a great everyday performer; however, when you run out of cache (which shouldn’t be often), write pace falls off drastically.

SPECS AND PRICING

A standard 2.5-inch SATA 6Gbps SSD, the 870 QVO is currently available for preorder in a few of its capacities: the 2TB we tested ($250 from Newegg [go.pcworld. com/25eg]), and 4TB ($500 from Newegg [go.pcworld.com/4teg]). The 1TB capacity is on sale now for $130 on Amazon (go. pcworld.com/1tam) or $130 from Newegg (go.pcworld. com/1teg) in $130/1TB, $250/2TB (tested), and $500/4TB flavors. The 8TB model will be available in August for $900. That’s considerably cheaper than the high-capacity 4TB OWC Aura P12 (go. pcworld.com/ap12) and 8TB Sabrent Rocket Q NVMe (go.pcworld.com/srkq) drives we recently covered, and a far greater savings delta than we normally see between NVMe and SATA.

Samsung uses its own MKX controller, and there’s 1GB of DRAM cache for each 1TB of 96-layer, QLC (Quad-Level Cell/4-bit) stacked/layered/3D NAND on board. The drives seemingly allocate about 4.5 percent of the NAND as SLC cache, if our tests with the 2TB drive are indicative.