Packaging

The Drive

The drive conforms to the dimensions set forth by the 2.5" form factor. It is made out of metal to improve its durability and is only 7 mm thick, which ensures it will fit into modern notebooks.


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


Taking the drive apart, we see a tiny PCB inside the mostly empty SSD case.


On the PCB, you'll find the controller, one flash chip, and a DRAM chip.

Chip Component Analysis

The Samsung MKX S4LR059 controller is a new variant with support for QLC. It uses eight flash channels. The previous model, 860 QVO, used the MJX controller.


As expected, the flash chip is made by Samsung, too, using V-NAND V5 technology, which is their second-generation QLC NAND flash, with 96 layers.


A Samsung LPDDR4-1866 chip provides 1 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.