Samsung’s 870 EVO succeeds the best-selling SATA SSD on the market, the company’s 860 EVO, and therefore has big shoes to fill. Normally, that would be a challenge, but Samsung has it going like clockwork: Samsung’s 870 EVO is now our top choice for those looking for the best consumer SATA SSD on the market.
With their high performance and efficiency, roomy capacities, and high reliability, Samsung’s SSDs have earned a large following and reputation over the years. The company hopes to build on its reputation with the Samsung 870 EVO, which builds on the company’s years of experience in flash storage.
The Samsung SSD 870 EVO is a SATA SSD in a standard 2.5-inch form factor. It is based on Samsung’s proprietary V-NAND 3-bit triple-layer cell (TLC) flash with Samsung’s in-house controller and is offered in five different storage volume sizes: 250 GB, 500 GB, 1 TB, 2 TB and 4 TB.
According to Samsung, the 4 TB drive we tested achieves sequential read speeds of up to 560 MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 530 MB/s, which is pretty standard for SATA 3.0 at this stage of the game. As for durability, the TBW (“Terabytes Written”) rating is an estimate of the total amount of write activity allowed during the life of the drive, after which the drive will begin to retire memory cells as they “wear out.
The 4TB Samsung SSD 870 EVO has a capacity of 2,400 TBW with a five-year warranty, which is right within standard expectations for SATA-based TLC drives with that capacity. The TBW scales with capacity, as you can see in the chart above. Samsung pairs each EVO drive with its excellent Samsung Magician software package, which continues to set the standard that all other storage manufacturers should follow.
From both an aesthetic and functional standpoint, Samsung Magician is second to none. The software features an elegant design that helps demystify some of the more complex storage management tasks, such as using Secure Erase or defragmenting the drive. We test all of our SATA and PCI Express 3.0 SSDs on PC Labs’ main storage test bench, which is built on an Asus Prime X299 Deluxe motherboard with an Intel Core i9-10980XE Extreme Edition CPU.
The Samsung SSD 870 EVO doesn’t offer a lot of innovation, but the incremental improvements Samsung has made to both flash technology and controllers seem to have translated into a decent boost in 4K random read and write performance.
It will be a full year before we see any jumps in sequential throughput at SATA 3.0 speeds. Until then, companies like Samsung are focusing their storage efforts on what they can: improving speeds for real-world 4K random read and write scenarios.
