Samsung 870 EVO SATA3 SSD Review (1/4TB) – Are Notebook SSDs Still a Thing? U Bet!

TxBENCH

TxBench is one of our newly discovered benchmarks that we works much the same as Crystal Diskmark, but with several other features.  Advanced load benchmarking can be configured, as well as full drive information and data erasing via secure erase, enhanced secure erase, TRIM and overwriting.  Simply click on the title for a free copy.

SAMSUNG MAGICIAN

Our last benchmark, but for Samsung’s own SSD Tool, The Samsung Magician shows us a benchmark of, not only the 870 EVO, but also, the Samsung 960 pro that we have had in use constantly over the past 4-5 years…still running strong.  Of specific interest with this software, however, are the full feature set that you see in the menu to the left of the drive, to include secure erase, over provisioning and other tools. It is very popular and free from Samsung; just click the title!

REAL WORLD FILE TRANSFER COMPARISON

For our Real World File Transfer Comparison, we have included we have included a few other SATA 3 SSDs that have come across our bench in the past few years. This test is conducted through the transfer of data from one spot on the test drive to another to give us the truest of transfer speed results for that device.

We were a bit surprised at the OS file transfers but do understand the placement of the one and four terabyte 870 EVO SSDs in the scheme of things.  Many may not realize it but (and few will admit this) but every generation of NAND is really a bit weaker than the previous and software and things such as SLC caching need to make up for the lesser performance.  Don’t believe us?  Check out pricing of some of the older MLC and even TLC SSDs.  Their prices have actually gone up significantly in most cases which is not the norm for retail sales.

REVIEW ANALYSIS AND FINAL THOUGHTS

We started this article off with a bit of reality, in that, SATA 3 SSDs get overlooked in the big scheme of things because it’s really just an amazing feat that M.2 SSDs can move data up to 7GB/s and have a capacity of up to 8TB.  The reality truly is though that more SATA 3 SSDs have sold than any other form factor.  SATA 3 is long from becoming past tense and the Samsung 870 EVO shows us just that.

The Samsung 870 EVO is available in capacities of 250GB up to 4TB and performance is right up there at the SATA 3 threshold of 560MB/s read and 530MB/s write with 97K read and 86K write IOPS at low 4K disk access.  It has 256-Bit hardware encryption, comes with a 5-year warranty and its performance is exactly what one might expect from a SATA 3 SSD…and then some.  Think endurance.  Where so many have jumped to QLC NAND flash memory ( as Samsung has also done with their QVO family), Samsung hasn’t only made this SSD rather attractive with their newest 128-Layer TLC V-NAND, but this is exactly the same memory used in the newest powerhouse 980 Pro PCIe 4 SSD.

Last but not least pricing…  As much as we appreciate Samsung dropping their prices on the day of announcement to remain ‘in tune’ with competition, and even their own previous pricing model for SATA 3 SSDs,  we still want to see better and Samsung could easily do it considering they are 100% in-house manufacturing.  While $39.99 may be great for the 250GB capacity, it would be really nice to see pricing just a bit lower at the premium levels of 1, 2 and 4TB.  Let’s start with being the first to market a ‘high end’ SATA 3 SSD at under the $100 mark for the 1TB version.

Check out Samsung 870 EVO Pricing at Amazon!