Samsung 870 QVO 1 TB

[Assimilator]

I don't care about theoreticals, I care about the practical reality in the market right now. That is what I'm buying into, not the promise of tomorrow. So far, QLC did not deliver and there were numerous other SSD related developments that similarly did not deliver. In all new things storage the wise approach is to wait and see how reliable it truly turns out to be. You're right that in theory you could make great QLC drives... but then the next question is, how expensive are those? If you have to put expensive memory and other hardware next to ultra cheap NAND, the net gain might be zero, and judging by the pricing, it apparently is.

But hey, to each his own, if you have faith in QLC, by all means, worship it.

The retention figure is interesting, I knew the article, but yes, all things considered 10 years is still pretty long in the consumer situation I suggested. Its not very likely a mechanical HDD will do that much better as far as recovering your data goes; it just runs a different sort of risk. So fair enough, maybe QLC is half decent for longer term mass storage (not necessarily cold storage ).

Do you really think that Intel and Samsung, two of the biggest NAND manufacturers in the world, would put money into R&D and production of QLC if they didn't have faith in it? I don't. As such, I have faith in QLC inasmuch as I have faith in those companies' abilities to make prudent decisions around the future of NAND.

My personal take on QLC is that it hasn't been prioritised as highly as it could have been, mostly due to the advent of 3D NAND which extended the market lifetime of TLC NAND. But all good things come to an end and TLC's is coming, which means QLC is now getting the focus it needs to become a viable product. Unfortunately, "viable" means "not cut to the bone because Samsung are greedy fucks" like this model of drive.

 

[bug]

Do you really think that Intel and Samsung, two of the biggest NAND manufacturers in the world, would put money into R&D and production of QLC if they didn't have faith in it? I don't. As such, I have faith in QLC inasmuch as I have faith in those companies' abilities to make prudent decisions around the future of NAND.

Faith in QLC is not a requirement. They have marketing departments to make sure it all comes down to faith in finding enough suckers to buy the finished product.

I'm sure they considered carefully where QLC will end up before committing, but at the same time I'm also pretty sure neither could predict exactly where QLC will end up.
Maybe there's untapped potential, but these initial batches are definitely not worth it. And since these initial batches are all we have so far, that's what QLC is judged by.

 

[EsaT]

Faith in QLC is not a requirement. They have marketing departments to make sure it all comes down to faith in finding enough suckers to buy the finished product.

That's why everyone wants to sell brand nowadays for Joe Average Consumer.
I mean just look at Samsung's SSD prices.
Half TB NVMe costs usually quite near to 1TB NVMes of others.
TLC SATA drive costs same/little as same size NVMes from others.
And QLC SATA drive costs same/more than TLC SATA drives of others.

Can't wait to see their PCIe v4 drive prices.
Probably 200+ % more per GB/TB than perfectly good PCIe v3 drive...
We should just call PC Master Race plain Cash Cow Race for buying so much brand and marketing hype overpriced stuff.

Do you really think that Intel and Samsung, two of the biggest NAND manufacturers in the world, would put money into R&D and production of QLC if they didn't have faith in it? I don't. As such, I have faith in QLC inasmuch as I have faith in those companies' abilities to make prudent decisions around the future of NAND.

Those companies are managed by bean counters and marketing clowns, not by actual engineers.

QLC's only promise is consuming less of that expensive silicon area per bit.
Outside that it's technically polishing turd and brand sticker, or 4bit "MLC" marketing scammery won't change that.
And I doubt that will ever change:
In planar NAND with its mandated tiny transistors TLC was similar mess and needed regular data refresh to have better data retention than garbage quality CD/DVD blanks.
Only 3D NAND's big transistors made TLC well working.
But now there's no "4D" NAND or any such trick remaining to fix QLC.

 

[Chrispy_]

"buy the cheapest SSD you can find, you'll save $30 and it will still perform better than the Samsung 870 QVO"

Ouch. What a turd!

Samsung really have dropped the ball on NAND products recently. They're not in the headlines as performance leaders any more, they're just overpriced also-rans in a very crowded field of decent NVMe drives.

As for their QLC products, they've consistently been terrible. I mean, the ancient P1 and 660p are not 'good' SSDs but at least they're adequate.

 

[trparky]

They're not in the headlines as performance leaders any more, they're just overpriced also-rans in a very crowded field of decent NVMe drives.

Other than for those of us who trust the Samsung name. I'm one of them. I have two Samsung SSDs in my desktop and they've never let me down, they provide fantastic performance.

 

[Chrispy_]

Other than for those of us who trust the Samsung name. I'm one of them. I have two Samsung SSDs in my desktop and they've never let me down, they provide fantastic performance.

Yeah, I don't trust Samsung. I had to manually install scheduled workarounds for 50+ defective Samsung 840 and 840EVO drives. Samsung should have recalled those drives, and the firmware shouldn't have taken 18 months to arrive, and it only addressed ONE of the three affected products with 1st-gen TLC.

I don't suspect anyone with a self-detonating Samsung Note or an exploding Samsung washing machine, or failed 13-month old LED TV will fully trust them either. They're a bad company that, despite being popular, have cut corners plenty of times leaving the consumer either out of pocket, or at risk from unsafe product design. Given their size, Samsung as a company have lost more class action lawsuits than seems reasonable.

They take risks, use consumers as paying guinea-pigs and deal with the acceptable (to them) fallout because multi-billion dollar marketing budgets shout louder than some negative press. Let's face it, on average, consumers are fickle and stupid with short memories. They buy what's shiny and fashionable, not what's necessarily good value, safe, reliable, or environmentally-responsible...

 

[Scour]

Overall QLC is awful for ppl who like a SSD-like performance

But the next thing is Samsung-prices. But the 4TB is the cheapest I get here, the next is QLC Adata SU630

But if you look for 4TB or more is hard to find something. Dunno why Crucial don´t have 4TB of MX500.

 

[cat1092]

This isn't the 1st time Samsung has produced a 'value' SSD & became a flop fast.

Believe it was called the 750 EVO, with a similar 3 year warranty, with watered down TLC components (maybe what QLC is today. After all, this is a corporation which still calls their 850 EVO & 970 EVO's '3-bit MLC' drives. There's no such thing (or no other has marketed it as such), these are TLC drives.

That said, unlike Samsung's venture into the 750 EVO, Intel & other distributors has hopped onto the wagon (maybe Intel was first). Today, QLC stands in the same position as TLC in 2013/14, many of these drives had issues, such as the Samsung 840 EVO, to which they shipped out a 'fix' to help with read slowness. This utility was to be ran once monthly or as needed. However, I had two of these drives, the 120GB model runs perfect to this day (although due to size, capped at 450MB/sec read & write), the 250GB benches like a SATA-2 SSD at times. I've found running the Disk Fresh tool (free download), in read only mode, to be a better solution & takes about half as long to do the job (if the drive isn't too badly messed up). Sometimes, will need to be ran twice. Afterwards, benchmarks shows the drive to near specifications, at least for a week or two.

That was the price of being an early TLC adopter & will be the same with QLC. I can't believe how some of the popular YouTube review sites recommends the Intel 660p (1TB QLC NVMe), which reads & writes at near PCIe 2.0 speeds. When one can for $20 more (or less on promo), get a TLC model of the same size which will read at up to 3,500 MB/sec & write up to 3,000 MB/sec, What type of idiots to these professional reviewers think we are? They must be paid good to make these bold claims.

While they maintain one can't 'tell the difference', try transferring a newly released Windows 10 ISO onto this drive from another source, will begin to throttle after 100-150MB. These aren't designed to dump 3-4GB of data on at a rapid pace. Looks like they're using their 'premium' DRAM chips in GPU's & passing the watered down crap to the SSD line. Maybe this is also why the DRAM-less models. LIke QLC, these throttles fast.

I only hope that the Samsung keeps their Pro line of SSD's (SATA-3 & NVMe) of MLC drives on the market, no need to water these down. No one will pay current Pro prices for TLC drives, like $159 (current price) for a 512GB 970 Pro. Not going to happen. Intel has already taken the dive, hopefully Samsung won't, not on their top line models.

Cat

 

[Chrispy_]

This isn't the 1st time Samsung has produced a 'value' SSD & became a flop fast.

Believe it was called the 750 EVO, with a similar 3 year warranty, with watered down TLC components (maybe what QLC is today. After all, this is a corporation which still calls their 850 EVO & 970 EVO's '3-bit MLC' drives. There's no such thing (or no other has marketed it as such), these are TLC drives.

That said, unlike Samsung's venture into the 750 EVO, Intel & other distributors has hopped onto the wagon (maybe Intel was first). Today, QLC stands in the same position as TLC in 2013/14, many of these drives had issues, such as the Samsung 840 EVO, to which they shipped out a 'fix' to help with read slowness. This utility was to be ran once monthly or as needed. However, I had two of these drives, the 120GB model runs perfect to this day (although due to size, capped at 450MB/sec read & write), the 250GB benches like a SATA-2 SSD at times. I've found running the Disk Fresh tool (free download), in read only mode, to be a better solution & takes about half as long to do the job (if the drive isn't too badly messed up). Sometimes, will need to be ran twice. Afterwards, benchmarks shows the drive to near specifications, at least for a week or two.

That was the price of being an early TLC adopter & will be the same with QLC. I can't believe how some of the popular YouTube review sites recommends the Intel 660p (1TB QLC NVMe), which reads & writes at near PCIe 2.0 speeds. When one can for $20 more (or less on promo), get a TLC model of the same size which will read at up to 3,500 MB/sec & write up to 3,000 MB/sec, What type of idiots to these professional reviewers think we are? They must be paid good to make these bold claims.

While they maintain one can't 'tell the difference', try transferring a newly released Windows 10 ISO onto this drive from another source, will begin to throttle after 100-150MB. These aren't designed to dump 3-4GB of data on at a rapid pace. Looks like they're using their 'premium' DRAM chips in GPU's & passing the watered down crap to the SSD line. Maybe this is also why the DRAM-less models. LIke QLC, these throttles fast.

I only hope that the Samsung keeps their Pro line of SSD's (SATA-3 & NVMe) of MLC drives on the market, no need to water these down. No one will pay current Pro prices for TLC drives, like $159 (current price) for a 512GB 970 Pro. Not going to happen. Intel has already taken the dive, hopefully Samsung won't, not on their top line models.

Cat

Diskfresh was my solution to the Samsung 840, 840Evo, and all the OEM PM881 drives that were utterly broken. Only the 840 EVO ever received a fix in firmware, so that was no use to the 100+ mixed models that I had to deal with and like you say, the Firmware fix was both months too late and not particularly good anyway.

 

[Scour]

The 750 Evo was not that bad, the c´tmagazine made a reliability-test with it and the both 750 250GB write 1,2PB till failure. The other end was theBX200 with 187TB/283TB till failure

The problem with the 750 was more the price and the little capacities

 

[AsRock]

Other than for those of us who trust the Samsung name. I'm one of them. I have two Samsung SSDs in my desktop and they've never let me down, they provide fantastic performance.

Yeah picking up another tomorrow a 860 1TB, i nearly got the QVO as max performance is not needed with so many games but like 37$ gets you a better performing one so ended up getting the none QVO, all so picked up a MX500 too.

 

[aviasd]

I wish I would have found this article before I bought my 860 QVO.

I've spent 4 days investigating my SATA controllers , SATA cables, Mobo, drivers etc, failing to realize Samsung would put out such a horrible performance disk on the market.

After some research, I found out that indeed such a drive exists and called an SSD but in real life performs lower than a low end HDD!

Samsung looks shy about advertising this as can be seen on the product's page under the fine fine print ( I don't recall when I saw a disclaimer in such a small font), but on the Product's spec , it does specify that speeds go down after TurboWrite buffer is exhausted - again in small print (bullet no. 3).

There's a claim is that TurboWrite adjusts for up to 48Gb depending on available space but all my tests on an emptied disk shows that TW is always exhausted after 12-16GB of writes)

The drive is priced a bit more than other manufacturers on the low end (~5-10$ on the 1Tb model) , but even the lowest end SSDs don't exhibit this behavior. ( verified )

It's a problem there is no awareness by the standard consumer - or even resellers for that matter, that a drive can be branded as SSD and underperform in such a way, especially when bought from a giant like Samsung which most people consider as reliable.

As said on the article, a synthetic benchmark does show the expected speeds but in real life this disk is useless if writing extensively, IMO correctly pointing out that the drive was designed to perform well on these synthetic tests.

The degraded performance and exhausting of SLC can be seen in CrystalDiskMark by writing around 16Gb of data (8Gb file twice, or 16GB file once) - the speed should be around 80Mb/s. The sequential write test is enough to show this.
Anything sized below that, (providing that the SLC had enough idle time to evict data) should show write speeds of around 500Mb/s.

I used to buy Samsung's products and recommended them to family and friends as reliable, but after this stunt I'm going to avoid them as much as possible.

 

[AsRock]

I wish I would have found this article before I bought my 860 QVO.

I've spent 4 days investigating my SATA controllers , SATA cables, Mobo, drivers etc, failing to realize Samsung would put out such a horrible performance disk on the market.

After some research, I found out that indeed such a drive exists and called an SSD but in real life performs lower than a low end HDD!

Samsung looks shy about advertising this as can be seen on the product's page under the fine fine print ( I don't recall when I saw a disclaimer in such a small font), but on the Product's spec , it does specify that speeds go down after TurboWrite buffer is exhausted - again in small print (bullet no. 3).

There's a claim is that TurboWrite adjusts for up to 48Gb depending on available space but all my tests on an emptied disk shows that TW is always exhausted after 12-16GB of writes)

The drive is priced a bit more than other manufacturers on the low end (~5-10$ on the 1Tb model) , but even the lowest end SSDs don't exhibit this behavior. ( verified )

It's a problem there is no awareness by the standard consumer - or even resellers for that matter, that a drive can be branded as SSD and underperform in such a way, especially when bought from a giant like Samsung which most people consider as reliable.

As said on the article, a synthetic benchmark does show the expected speeds but in real life this disk is useless if writing extensively, IMO correctly pointing out that the drive was designed to perform well on these synthetic tests.

The degraded performance and exhausting of SLC can be seen in CrystalDiskMark by writing around 16Gb of data (8Gb file twice, or 16GB file once) - the speed should be around 80Mb/s. The sequential write test is enough to show this.
Anything sized below that, (providing that the SLC had enough idle time to evict data) should show write speeds of around 500Mb/s.

I used to buy Samsung's products and recommended them to family and friends as reliable, but after this stunt I'm going to avoid them as much as possible.

So you could say good enough for most gaming needs ?, although i believe the Samsung 1TB at $100 is to much for it as you have the MX500 for the same price. Not many people copy GB's of data in one run never mind 12+GB.

This is why you should check out a bunch of reviews before buying.

 

[aviasd]

So you could say good enough for most gaming needs ?, although i believe the Samsung 1TB at $100 is to much for it as you have the MX500 for the same price. Not many people copy GB's of data in one run never mind 12+GB.

This is why you should check out a bunch of reviews before buying.

For gaming needs yes, for developers no.
I don't know what's the ratio between work related use of SSDs to gaming but in my soho I stop/resume 8GB VMs as a standard use.
This document by Samsung states that evicting up the TW cache on 1TB model takes 55s on idle time, but it does not describe what is considered idle time. My setup for example writes at a constant rate of 4Mb/s to the disk various logs and files and i didn't observe complete eviction also after 3mins of "idle" time.

My purpose of buying the SSD was to get expected results from an SSD. I'm not an expert on these things and only after the fact found this QLC/SLC thing. It was not to get the best disk, but a reasonable SSD from a reputed company..

I really don't think consumer should spend a few hours before buying something like an SSD and this article is the only one I found which clearly states the awfulness of the disk, and it's after direct query ("samsung qlc technology is bad") - it doesn't show up in the first page result on a standard search.

 

[AsRock]

Then i guess you should of done your research ?. If more people did spend time in what they are buying there be a lot less people complaining when stuff is not up to what they imagined.

Like shi anyways it don't take 2 hours more like 10-30 minutes for the most part.

EDIT:
Shame you did not do your research before hand then MAYBE you would of found TPU and found out what you needed to know.

 

[W1zzard]

So you could say good enough for most gaming needs ?

If you are willing to wait extra long during game installs/decrypt/updates, maybe. Level loading will be barely affected. But why pay SO much more than any other drive for A LOT less performance? Unless you want to give money to the Samsung charity of course

 

[aviasd]

Maybe I was misunderstood - Before buying I always do a certain research - usually on sites like UserBench and reading a couple of reviews, as was done for this SSD. This entails the 10-30 minutes research you're referring..

But in this particular case you wouldn't encounter this issue unless you knew you what you're looking for, since UserBench test is also fooled by TW.
Only after research and exact search querying I found TPU's review, in fact, after believing my drive was actually faulty.

In retrospect I don't know if I could have done something different before actually getting hands on the drive because really it's very hard to find this issue searching the web..
You can check for yourself....

EDIT: Yes, from now on TPU is my new goto place for research

 

[AsRock]

I didn't say it was worth it, in fact i said i think it's over priced due to one example the MX500. You talking what i said out of context.

Right now for me the 860 1TB is $137 and the QVO is about 35$ less, but you have the Crucial MX500 at 103$ which is for sure the better option but in the line of work he's doing he would of been better of spending the little extra.

What games load 12+GB ?. again for the most part most would not even notice.

Maybe I was misunderstood - Before buying I always do a certain research - usually on sites like UserBench and reading a couple of reviews, as was done for this SSD. This entails the 10-30 minutes research you're referring..

But in this particular case you wouldn't encounter this issue unless you knew you what you're looking for, since UserBench test is also fooled by TW.
Only after research and exact search querying I found TPU's review, in fact, after believing my drive was actually faulty.

In retrospect I don't know if I could have done something different before actually getting hands on the drive because really it's very hard to find this issue searching the web..
You can check for yourself....

Yeah never go by just one place, who the hell is TW ?.

I guess lesson learned, shit happens, although if you not had the drve to long maybe you can return it ?.

 

[aviasd]

Yeah never go by just one place, who the hell is TW ?.

TW = Samsung's TurboWrite

I guess lesson learned, shit happens, although if you not had the drve to long maybe you can return it ?.

lol, It on the resellers lab right now.
My guess is that he didn't know about this thing because he said that this degraded performances after 12GB is bad and he's going to check the disk for a while...
I've had the drive for bout a month and a half now - Best case he'll replace it , worst case I lost 130$... worse things can happen..

 

[AsRock]

Good Luck

EDIT: Welcome to TPU.

 

[W1zzard]

I didn't say it was worth it, in fact i said i think it's over priced due to one example the MX500. You talking what i said out of context.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to. I just saw several people in other social media defend the drive "it's good enough for gaming"

 

[INSTG8R]

This has definitely made me question the quality of my 860 QVO...

 

[Chrispy_]

There's a claim is that TurboWrite adjusts for up to 48Gb depending on available space but all my tests on an emptied disk shows that TW is always exhausted after 12-16GB of writes)

TIL that the 1TB model is single-channel and only has a guaranteed SLC cache of 6GB.

That makes it no better than MicroSD/eMMC!

I feel sorry for anyone who is trying to use an 860QVO as a consumer system drive. IMO its unfit for purpose and the only niche it's remotely suitable for would be as WORM media for a high-performance archive server. Except anyone building a high-performance archive server has far better QLC options from more reputable brands than Samsung, so the QVO is basically an un-polishable, un-flushable turd.

Good luck with the refund. MX500 is a fine drive, as are the latest WD Blue and Sandisk Ultra

 

[Scour]

I´m not a fan of Samsungs overpriced SSDs, but I´m not sure whether any competitor write in the specs the write speed after the SLC-cache, but Samsung did it.

However, with SSDs up to 2TB I would stay with the MX500 or Samsung/WD 3D, makes much more sense to me than any SSD with QLC, whatever the name of the manufacturer is.

Hope Crucial will also bring larger capacites with a Crucial-like price. And hope the MX500 will stay a long time or replace it with a good one.

 

[aviasd]

Update:
In the end, the reseller decided that the disk was defective and offered a new Samsung EVO.
He wasn't aware about the TurboWrite/Qlc issues even though I tried to explain him

I declined his offer and got a refund

Hope more people were aware of this and decline to purchase.. Maybe it would have forced Samsung to stop using this tech or at least put in a warning. This disk is so popular in Israel...