The Samsung 870 EVO 4 TB has been on the market for a long time, it was released in February 2021 and has remained Samsung's flagship SATA drive to this day. As expected, it is using only Samsung in-house components, which is a very important capability, as it allows Samsung to optimize their production planning and I'm quite sure that in-house sales get preferential treatment, which ensures a steady supply of components. Not a lot of companies are able to work in such a fashion—for the SSD space it's just Samsung, Micron (Crucial) and WD SanDisk. Under the hood, we found the Samsung MKX Metis controller, which has been tested for many years in millions of drives. The NAND flash is Samsung's 128-layer 3D TLC V-NAND V6. A DRAM cache chip is included, too, for the mapping tables of the SSD. Here a 4 GB LPDDR4-1866 IC is used.

Synthetic performance of the Samsung 870 EVO is solid. Sequential speeds are pretty much all hitting the limit of the SATA 6 Gbps connection interface, and thus are very similar to other SATA SSDs. Random IO varies more between drives in this test group—the 870 EVO is definitely leading the pack here, but the differences are fairly small. The Crucial MX500, which is the drive's main competitor, is only faster in random read, but falls behind in the other tests. Compared to M.2 NVMe drives there is really no way to catch them, especially not in sequential transfers.

In terms of real-life performance, the 870 EVO is the second-fastest 2.5" SATA SSD that we've tested, right behind the Seagate Barracuda 120. Compared to its predecessor, the 860 EVO, the gap is only 2%, which makes the 860 EVO a viable alternative. The Crucial MX500 is 8% behind, and the QLC based SATA drives are 20 to 30% slower—definitely not recommended considering today's pricing. If we take a look at individual tests, some clearly show the superiority of M.2 NVMe, especially in scenarios where they can play out their bandwidth advantage. Here you often have to wait two or three times as long with a SATA drive. But there's also workloads that run just a few seconds longer—hardly a big deal. Surprisingly, game load times are not nearly as bad as I would have expected, waiting a few seconds longer is very reasonable.

The most important test for me in this review for the 870 EVO specifically, is our "sustained writes" test, which fills the whole drive with data as quickly as possible. Due to the way TLC drives are designed, with pseudo-SLC cache, they are able to soak up bursts of write activity quickly, but once their cache capacity is exhausted, write speeds will drop considerably. I'm always on the lookout for the fastest SATA SSD that can saturate the SATA link while filling its whole capacity. Unfortunately such a thing doesn't seem to exist. The Samsung 870 EVO is one of the best options though. While its 24 GB SLC cache is tiny by today's standards, there is only a small loss in write speeds. Filling the whole 4 TB capacity completed at 416 MB/s, which is a very good result. It is considerably faster than the QLC-based Samsung 870 QVO (116 MB/s), and the Crucial MX500 (378 MB/s). The Seagate Barracuda 120 is a tiny bit faster with 420 MB/s, but is very hard to find nowadays, and there is no 4 TB model available. The only other option that's widely available and somewhat affordable is the SanDisk Ultra 3D 4 TB, which reaches only 390 MB/s, so closer to MX500 than to 870 EVO. It looks like 870 EVO is the best choice here if you want a 4 TB SATA drive that can handle tons of incoming data.

The Samsung 870 EVO 4 TB is widely available, but its price of $225 is just too high to make it interesting for a general audience. MAP1602-powered M.2 NVMe SSDs like the Lexar NM790 are a much faster and more affordable alternative that you always should prefer over a SATA SSD. They are available for around $200 for 4 TB—a no-brainer really. I would definitely fill up all my M.2 slots first, before considering a SATA SSD, at least for a typical system that gets changed rarely. For some of my open bench test systems, SATA SSDs are a convenient way to swap between multiple OS installations and data sets, without having to deal with small M.2 drives and screwdrivers, especially when storage performance is not important. If your M.2 slots are all filled up, then large SATA SSDs like the 4 TB 870 EVO are definitely an alternative to the much slower mechanical HDDs. On the other hand, $200 buys you a 12 or 14 TB HDD nowadays, but once you get used to SSD speeds, it's hard to run interactive workloads off a mechanical hard drive.

Things get interesting when you consider the used market. Here the Samsung 870 EVO 4 TB sells for around $150, which makes it considerably more affordable than even the cheapest modern NVMe drives, even though some QLC-based models are getting close, but their sustained write speeds are terrible and slower than what we've seen in this review. I don't think you need to worry about endurance. The 870 EVO in this review is rated for 2400 TBW, that's filling the 4 TB capacity 600 (!) times. Even if you install one 100 GB game every single day, you'll only write 36.5 TB in a year, or 100 TB in the 1000 days that the 870 EVO has been on the market—definitely a non-issue.