Samsung SSD 870 EVO: SATA strikes back



[ad_1]

This site can earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

Do you remember SATA? We don’t talk much about the old storage standard anymore, not since M.2 became popular, but there are still a large number of SATA SSDs on the market. Samsung’s 870 EVO family of SSDs is the latest iteration of Samsung hardware to serve this market, and many reviews online today attest to the overall effectiveness of the product.

The question of whether to use a SATA versus an M.2 SSD is an interesting example of an area where benchmarks can be precise and fail to convey the experience of using a product. The practical differences between daily use of an M.2 drive and a SATA drive tend to be imperceptible. If your daily use habits involve a lot of heavy data copies, you will likely benefit from M.2, but if you don’t, you can sometimes save money and maximize the available capacity by switching to for a SATA drive. A 2.5-inch case offers much more space for NAND ICs than an M.2 dongle.

We’ve rounded up reviews from PCMag, PCWorld, and Hot Hardware to see what people have to say. Everyone across the board has praise for this new family of readers. The 870 EVO is based on Samsung’s triple-bit V-NAND (TLC) and launches at capacities of 250GB ($ 49), 500GB ($ 80), 1TB ($ 139), 2TB ($ 269) ) and 4 TB ($ 529). The price per GB ranges from 20 cents on the 250 GB drive to 13 cents on the 4 TB drive. All of these drives have a five year warranty.

Image from PCMaghttps: //www.pcmag.com/reviews/samsung-ssd-870-evo

One of the reasons to buy a SATA SSD over an M.2 drive is the price difference. Looking at previous drives, Samsung’s 1TB 860 EVO 2.5 ″ SSD costs $ 109 from Newegg, while its M.2 counterpart – which also uses SATA 6G signaling, although it fits into a slot. M.2 – is $ 149. Although M.2 drives outperform their SATA counterparts, the difference between commercial software may not be great. (Artificial testing of sequential read / write performance will always favor M.2 drives).

According to PCMag, “[T]The Samsung SSD 870 EVO has proven not only to be a leader among SATA drives, but also a regular competitor with NVMe M.2 PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 4.0 drives. While both of these standards are great for what they do (achieving all-time sequential bitrate recordings), their added bandwidth doesn’t always translate into better 4K random read and write scores, which is what a large percentage of SSD buyers in this category tend to care the most. “

The performance figures they refer to can be seen below:

By the way, PCWorld notes that while the 870 EVO and 870 QVO offer similar performance in many ways, the 870 EVO can keep its high performance even when writing huge single files. The 870 QVO is a QLC NAND drive that relies on SLC caching to keep performance at acceptable levels. This is a common method to improve SSD performance when using QLC NAND, but once the SLC cache is exhausted, the drive performance drops dramatically.

Image from PCWorld

The 870 EVO does not have this problem. Again, how often you’ll encounter it depends on how many huge file writes you do on a regular basis, but these are the scenarios in which an MLC or TLC drive works best on a QLC + SLC cache device.

In this case, the conclusions are straightforward. Hot Hardware writes, “If you need a high capacity, high performance SATA SSD and want something from a respected brand with a long history in the field, the Samsung SSD 870 EVO series should be on the top. from your short list. PCWorld says, “The Samsung 870 EVO is by far the best device in its class, and one of the best of all classes in all use cases.” PCMag writes that the 870 EVO “should be at the top of anyone’s list who wants the best combination of performance, product quality and price in a 2.5-inch.”

If you’re trying to figure out whether to buy a SATA SSD or an M.2 SSD, here’s advice from ExtremeTech: If you’re happy with the I / O performance of your current SATA SSD, don’t be afraid to ‘Save a few dollars by going for SATA, especially if you need to cut costs or want to invest money in a better processor or GPU. If you want to maximize capacity and are happy with current performance, don’t be afraid to go for a larger SATA drive over a smaller M.2. If you’re still sitting on an old-fashioned hard drive and delayed the upgrade because SATA is old and your motherboard doesn’t support M.2, forget that and buy yourself a SATA SSD . Switching from a hard drive to an SSD is one of the few guaranteed ways to improve performance even of an old machine.

Now read:



[ad_2]

Source link