The Samsung 860 Evo is certainly one of the most sold SSDs worldwide. After about three years, Samsung has now subjected its “classic” to a major update, which will go on sale as Samsung 870 Evo at the end of January 2021. The focus is on an attractive price and the highest possible speed considering the now obsolete SATA interface.
In terms of price, the Samsung 870 Evo lies between the faster 980 Pro and the slower 870 QVO in the company’s portfolio. In the 870 Evo, Samsung installs the less expensive controller of the 870 QVO and the high-quality V-NAND v6 chips of the 980 Pro.
Performance of the Samsung 870 Evo
The eight-channel MKX controller of the Samsung 870 Evo is capable of AES-256 hardware encryption. The mapping table is kept in the LPDDR4 memory as DRAM cache. According to Samsung, this combination of MKX chip and V-NAND v6 instead of MJX chip and V-NAND v4 ensures more performance in the 870 Evo compared to the 860 Evo. This is particularly evident in the input/operations per second (IOPS) read rate, which increases by 38 percent.
The sequential data rates, on the other hand, remain almost identical. When reading, the 870 Evo reaches up to 560 MByte/s, when writing, it is up to 530 MByte/s, for the models with 1 TB and more capacity.
SLC buffer on 250 GByte and 500 GByte Samsung 870 Evo
The Evo 870 models with 250 GByte and 500 GByte capacity, on the other hand, use an SLC buffer. If this runs full, the write performance drops to 300 MByte/s with the TLC memory. The read performance on the other hand is identical to the larger models.
To use the dynamic write cache, 27 GBytes (250 GByte version) or 54 GBytes (500 GByte version) have to remain free on the SSD. Otherwise, only the static buffer with 3 GBytes or 4 GBytes is available.
Despite the speed disadvantage compared to the larger Evo 870 models, the 250 GByte and 500 GByte 870 Evo SSDs are also significantly faster than all 870 QVO SSDs, which only manage 160 MByte/s when writing thanks to the QLC memory.
Prices and Availability
The new Samsung 870 Evo seems to be a good choice for all computers that still use the SATA port. The SSD is offered exclusively in the 2.5-inch form factor.
250 GBytes cost 40 Euros, 500 GBytes 70 Euros, 1 TB 140 Euros, 2 TB 270 Euros and 4 TBytes 550 Euros. The warranty is five years.
