Samsung – 870 QVO 2TB Internal 2.5” SATA III Solid State Drive for Laptops and Desktops Single Unit version

I use Samsung SSDs almost exclusively in all of my PCs, including gaming machines. My 2TB 860 EVO is almost full, so I was excited to receive this 870 QVO to expand my gaming storage. For general use and game storage, this drive is perfectly fine and will offer a dramatic improvement over traditional mechanical hard drives. However, power users will want to be aware of some of the drive’s limitations.
PROS:
– Speeds are very fast, pretty much as fast as you can get from a SATA interface. As you can see from the attached screenshot, sequential read/write speeds are in excess of 500 MB/s. Random read/write speeds are slower, but that is simply the nature of these drives. For general day-to-day computing and storage of games or media files, these speeds are great and infinitely better than a standard mechanical drive.
– The 870 QVO is offered in sizes up to 8 TB, which is unheard of in a 2.5″ SSD.
CONS:
– Due to the nature of QLC flash, the endurance of this drive is lower than other models that cost just a bit more. “Endurance” refers to how much data can be written to a drive before it eventually fails. The endurance of this drive (the 1 TB model) is rated at 360 TB — which is a ton of data for the average user, but might not last quite long enough for power users like video editors. The 4 TB model increases this dramatically to an endurance of 1440 TB, but these numbers are still lower than Samsung’s EVO lineup of drives which use a different type of flash.
OVERALL:
Honestly, there are practically no downsides to this drive for 99% of users. For those who frequently work with very large files and transfer a ton of data every day, then the lower endurance of these QVO drives might mean the drive will fail sooner. But for everyone else, that is a non-issue and this drive will last a very long time and provide plenty of speed. Recommended!

Will start my review by admitting I have five Samsung SDD and NVMe m.2 drives in my machines to date. There are reasons for that as you may have deduced. They are rock-solid, dependable, and fast with excellent warranties.
My first Samsung SSD has been quietly humming along for many years managing and storing my data, which leads me to trust the new installation of the 870 QVO will be here for many years delivering data storage.
First response upon opening the packaging was my kid, “wow looks cool.” Samsung SSD’s have always had a polished look to their cases, a sign of the quality that lies within. They do look cool by the way.
Samsung’s website claims they are “Achieving the maximum SATA interface limit of 560/530 MB/s sequential speeds” with the 870 QVO. Benchmarks run on CrystalDiskMark shows that the 870 QVO is pushing the data to the limit that SATA III allows. Absolutely great numbers from a SATA III SSD, especially running on an older gaming laptop I used for benchmarking. In fact, the benchmarks were the best I have seen on an SSD.
OK, we all know Samsung drives are leaders in SSD/NVMe m.2 technology. So, what stands out with the 870 QVO drive?
– Sequential Read Speed Up to 560 MB/sec
– Sequential Write Speed Up to 530 MB/sec
– Intelligent TurboWrite
– 2,880 TBW double the previous model 860 QVO (TBW – Time between failure)
– Three Year Warranty
– Refinements to the ECC algorithm that enables stable performance
– Samsung Magician – Best software for managing SSD drives on the market
– Data Migration Software – move your stuff over with ease and confidence
You make get the idea I like Samsung drives, well I do, they are fast superb performers and the 870 QVO is the latest in the lineup. Hands down the best performing SSD in my systems.
Plus, they look cool!

This drive pushes the limits of the SATA interface for solid state drives available today. Samsung labels this drive as having a read speed of up to 560MB/s, and a write speed of up to 530MB/s . Based on my tests I was able to pull out write of 526.95MB/s and read speed of 559.04MB/s – write on par with advertised (or close enough!)
OUTSTANDING job, Samsung – I guess there’s a reason why so many enthusiasts will only use your drives!

I’ve been using SSDs of various interfaces and form factors (2.5″ SATA III, mSATA, M.2 SATA, M.2 NVMe, PCIe expansion card, etc.) in DIY rigs and upgrades for myself and my family for nearly 9 years now; and regardless of the underlying technology, there’s one constant that has always been true–going from a spinning hard drive to an SSD is about the most noticeable improvement you could EVER make to a PC, all other hardware being equal. This Samsung 870 QVO drive represents Samsung’s second generation of higher capacity SSDs based around new, but somewhat controversial, QLC flash memory. Does the QVO make for an equally compelling upgrade as any other style/type of SSDs before it? Generally, the answer is yes, I suppose…but the jury is still out on just how good a value this drive will be for the long haul.
You can read all about the pros and cons of QLC versus other types of memory if you wish, but a simplified elevator pitch is this: QLC represents a new storage architecture for SSDs that squeezes more bits onto the same sized chips. Practically speaking, this means larger SSDs can be made for less money…two areas where spinning hard drives ALWAYS held the advantage over faster yet more expensive SSDs. But this potential for higher capacity and lower cost comes with some fine print. First, because the bits are packed more tightly on the flash chips, write speeds may be a bit to a lot slower, especially after you’ve chewed through the available (much faster) cache memory the drive sets aside to speed up those write operations. Note, however, that the larger the drive you have (like 1TB or more), the less likely you are to consume all the available cache during any one disk operation (depending on how you’re using your drive). Second, the drives are rated for fewer TBW (terabytes written) than those leveraging competing storage technology, which implies that QLC drives may give out sooner than a similarly sized SSD with a different type of memory inside.
So what would all this mean to you? For starters, it SUGGESTS that a QLC drive might not be an ideal choice for something like your Windows/operating system’s drive where large write operations are happening all the time (for fear of wearing out the drive sooner). But of course that outcome would depend on how often and how aggressively you use your computer in the first place. For example, if you don’t create a lot of 4K videos or massive ISO images every day, you might well outgrow your PC before the drive ever starts to show signs of failure. Moreover, if you don’t routinely work with HUGE files (i.e. larger than 1GB), you might never hit that point where you’re trying to write a file to disk and exceed the available cache memory (at which point your write operations would definitely slow to a snail’s pace). Honestly, then, many of the merits of a drive like the QVO may simply come down to economics…how badly to you need to economize on your purchase while still enjoying the speed boost you’ll get from using an SSD in the first place, and will you notice any performance differences arising from the purposed weakness of QLC memory anyway?
I put my own 870 QVO through its paces by matching it head-to-head against Samsung’s 850 EVO 1TB 2.5″ SSD; it’s the exact same capacity drive in the exact same form factor as the new 870 QVO, and I’ve been using the 850 EVO as my primary Windows drive for about 5 years now. Now, I don’t pretend to understand all the ins and outs of drive benchmarking because frankly I really don’t care that much–and for a budget drive with high capacity like the QVO, I wasn’t looking for the N’th degree of high performance anyway. But for those of you who care, I ran CrystalDiskMark and Samsung Magician’s own benchmark tests on the two drives. The results attached below echo the common sentiments & findings floating around the net–yes, the QVO was observed to be a little slower than Samsung’s older non-QLC drive in some areas of the benchmark tests–but not really by *that* much, and in terms of any meaningful differences, it certainly didn’t feel like Windows was suddenly chugging along on the 870 QVO.
Where I think the value proposition for something like the QVO really shines is if you want to have a large SSD data drive for things like games, documents, photos, etc.–a drive that gets a lot of read action, but you don’t necessarily write/change the contents all that often, and not necessarily in huge chunks, either. In those cases, going with the 870 will save you on space, energy and noise over a similarly sized spinning hard drive; but you will DEFINITELY get the read/write speed bump that SSDs are known for. Unfortunately, for those unfamiliar with SSD migration or working with drives like these, the simplistic picture-book style instruction manual included with the 870 may lead one to believe their package was incomplete. If you intend to migrate your operating system from a spinning hard drive to the 870 QVO using Samsung’s Data Migration tool (which is a separate download from Samsung Magician BTW), Samsung DOES make the process dead simple with that tool, but the manual suggests that a USB-to-SATA adapter cable will be necessary. It’s also implied that one should have been in the box for you. In fact, all you get here is the bare drive…not even mounting screws. Of course, you can mount the drive internally in your PC using a regular SATA power connector and cable and still use the Samsung Data Migration tool, but for those of you looking to upgrade a laptop that doesn’t have a spare 2.5″ bay, you probably will need to obtain some sort of adapter unless you plan to simply reinstall Windows on the bare QVO drive upon power-up.
Otherwise, the Samsung Magician companion app is a pretty user-friendly piece of software for drive maintenance and optimization. Magician can check your drive’s firmware, over-provision the drive to improve long-term performance, enable RAPID mode to improve read/write performance (as I understand it, RAPID actually performs caching to speed up drive access similar to the way the QVO drive does already…it really didn’t seen to make any noticeable difference outside of benchmarking), securely erase your drive, and manage encryption/decryption operations. Magician runs resident in the background, but other than providing a one-click interface for maintenance or ensuring your firmware is up-to-date, there are plenty of people who run Samsung drives without it.
In the end, it’s hard to make an unqualified recommendation for the 870 QVO. Yes, it’s a slice of the “latest and greatest” trend in SSD storage, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s better than the alternatives (and in some cases, meaningfully so or not, it is definitely NOT as strong as the competition). But as a lower cost, higher capacity SSD, the 870 QVO still seems to have a place in today’s SSD landscape, especially as capacities of drives with QLC memory start to grow well beyond 1-2 TB. So long as the economics match with your intended use case, the QVO is a fair to decent performer; but if you are concerned/paranoid about long-term durability or are seeking top-of-the-line access speeds, there are definitely better-performing drives on the market for the same or similar price.