Samsung 870 EVO SATA SSD: The speed you need, at sane prices

Excellent performance and endurance ratings for a competitive price.

- JON L. JACOBI

Samsung’s been at the top of the SSD storage food chain since the day the company entered the market and the 870 EVO honors that tradition. It’s the fastest SATA SSD we’ve tested, it’s available in up to 4TB of capacity, and it’s exceedingly affordable given its speed.

SPECS AND PRICING

The 870 EVO is a 2.5-inch, SATA 6Gbps SSD employing Samsung’s own TLC (Triple-Level Cell/3-bit) V-NAND. The company is typically coy as to the actual controller technology or number of layers, but it’s likely an in-house Samsung-designed controller with, judging from the capacities, 92 or 96 layers.

The drive will ship in 250GB for $40, 500GB for $70, 1TB for $130, 2TB for $250, and 4TB for $480 flavors. There’s 512MB of primary DRAM cache for every 250GB of capacity, and the drives are rated for 150TBW (TeraBytes that may be Written) or five years of service—whichever comes first. That is, the five-year warranty is invalid once you exceed the TBW rating. Most end users won’t come close to writing that much data, so you can consider it five years.

The 870 EVO uses Samsung’s TurboWrite variable secondary cache algorithm, in which the main NAND is treated as SLC by writing only a single bit per voltage level. That should allow top write performance until the drive nears full capacity. As a rule of thumb, you should stay below 75 percent of capacity when using SSDs or performance will suffer.

PERFORMANCE