Samsung 870 QVO 8TB SATA3 2.5inch SSD

Hard Drive

Samsung 870 QVO 8TB SATA3 2.5inch SSD Main Picture


Background on Solid State Drives

Solid-state drives (SSDs) store data electrically, rather than on magnetic disks like traditional hard drives (HDDs). This means there is virtually no delay when seeking a specific bit of data, and there is no physical limitation to how fast reading and writing of data can happen. Instead, the limits come down to the controller inside the drive, the speed at which the individual flash memory chips can transfer information, and the connection between the drive and the rest of the computer.

These drives are available in many physical forms: 2.5-inch (similar in size to laptop HDDs), PCI-Express (which slot into a system like a graphics card), and M.2 "sticks". The more traditionally shaped drives usually connect to motherboards via SATA, just like hard drives do, and that connection itself tends to be the limiting factor in their performance. M.2 drives can use either SATA or the much faster PCI-Express connection, depending on the drive itself and the motherboard it is installed in. There are also U.2 drives, which are close in size to the 2.5-inch models but use a much faster data connection; they are found more often in servers and datacenters than in desktop workstations.

Samsung's 870 QVO line of 2.5-inch solid-state drives are aimed at users who need high capacity more than fast performance. These drives use a relatively slow form of flash memory, called QLC, and augment it with a small cache of much faster memory. This approach allows small file writes to be fast - up to 530MB/s - but once the cache is full the write speed will drop to around 200MB/s or even lower. That is still faster than most hard drives, though, and other benefits from SSD technology like lower latency are present as well. Moreover, read speeds are not impacted by the cache and can reach up to 560MB/s (in line with the maximum theoretical speeds for the SATA III 6Gbps connection).

Model: Samsung MZ-77Q8T0B/AM

Specifications

Capacity 8,000 GB
Interface SATA 6 Gb/s
Cache Size 8192 MB
Form Factor 2.5 Inch
Endurance (TBW) 2,880 TBW
Peak Power Draw 3.3 Watts
Net Weight 0.047 kg (0.1 lbs)
Performance
Sequential Read (Peak) 560 MB/s
Sequential Write (Peak) 530 MB/s
Random 4KB Read 98,000 IOPS
Random 4KB Write 88,000 IOPS

Once cache is saturated (e.g. during large write operations), write performance is reduced to ~200MB/s.