Introduction

As one of the world leaders in digital technology, Samsung pretty much makes any type of electronic device you can think of. Their products are used by millions of people around the world.

Being a leader in DRAM and flash memory production, it comes as no surprise that Samsung are also a huge player in the SSD business. Their EVO and PRO series SSDs are highly popular among upgraders, system builders, and enthusiasts.



I'm sure that right now you're wondering "Why is TPU publishing a SATA SSD review in late 2023?" No doubt, all the enthusiasm is with M.2 NVMe drives, which not only offer higher performance than SATA drives, they also use a much smaller form factor, which makes them more convenient. Their biggest drawback is the fact that the number of M.2 slots on a motherboard is relatively limited, especially compared to SATA, where virtually all boards have four, some even six or eight ports. Particularly when you don't need the fastest storage, SATA drives are a pretty easy way to add more storage to your system.

Personally I'm using SATA drives in several of my test systems, because the connection is tool-free, which makes them very quick to swap out, and the drives are physically larger, which makes it more difficult to misplace them. The most important reason I'm writing this review is that I wanted to know what sustained write speeds the 870 EVO 4 TB can achieve, which is important when I restore disk images or copy games around. Another relevant argument for SATA is that the used market has pretty good deals on used SSDs—the TBW rating on 4 TB models is so high that in my experience most of the drives come with 90%+ lifetime writes left on them. The 870 EVO is the most popular 4 TB model on the used market, the Crucial MX500 is close behind. I've bought the Samsung 870 EVO 4 TB in this review for just 140 Euros used, which makes it the cheapest 4 TB flash-based storage option by far. On eBay US you can often find these drives for around $150.

The Samsung 870 EVO is available in capacities of 250 GB ($32), 500 GB ($47), 1 TB ($60), 2 TB ($120) and 4 TB ($225). Endurance for these models is set to 150 TBW, 300 TBW, 600 TBW, 1200 TBW and 2400 TBW, respectively. Samsung includes a five-year warranty with the 870 EVO.

Packaging

The Drive

The drive conforms to the dimensions set forth by the 2.5" form factor. It is made out of plastic and is only 7 mm thick, which makes it compatible with notebooks with SATA-support, too.


The Samsung 870 EVO uses the SATA 6 Gbps interface. It is compatible with any older SATA standard, but will in such a case work at reduced performance.


On the PCB, you'll find the controller, four flash chips, and one DRAM cache chip.

Chip Component Analysis

The Samsung "Metis" MKX S4LR059 controller supports both TLC and QLC, it is used on both the Samsung 870 EVO and 870 QVO. It runs with eight flash channels and is fabricated on a 14 nanometer production process at Samsung.


As expected, the flash chip is made by Samsung, too, using V-NAND V6 technology with 128-layers.


A Samsung LPDDR4-1866 chip provides 4 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.

Test Setup

Synthetic Testing

• Tests are run with a 20-second-long warm-up time (result recording starts at second 21).
• Between each test, the drive is left idle for 60 seconds, to allow it to flush and reorganize its internal data.
• All write requests contain random, incompressible data.
• Disk cache is flushed between all tests.
• M.2 drives are tested with a fan blowing on them; that is, except for the results investigating uncooled behavior on the thermal testing page.