Samsung 870 EVO SATA SSD Review

The company’s own 860 EVO, the best-selling SATA SSD on the market, is being replaced by Samsung’s 870 EVO, which has big shoes to fill. Normally, this would be difficult, but for Samsung, it’s routine: Samsung’s 870 EVO is now our top recommendation for those looking for the best consumer SATA SSD available.
Samsung SSD has developed quite a following and reputation over the years thanks to its outstanding performance and efficiency, large capacities, and high-reliability ratings. With the addition of Samsung’s 870 EVO to its lineup, which is based on years of the company’s flash expertise, the company hopes to enhance its reputation further.

With its most recent 6th-gen 128-Layer V-NAND TLC flash and upgraded MKX ‘Metis’ SATA 6Gbps controller, Samsung’s 870 EVO is the most refined model yet. The new SSD is still constrained by the SATA interface and cannot compete with the most recent NVMe SSDs. Nevertheless, according to Samsung, the 870 EVO has up to 38% more performance than its predecessor for common computing tasks, and the 250GB model has up to 30% more sustained write performance.

TurboWrite w/ Intelligence

Each capacity should be comparable to that of the 860 EVO; typically, it will have a static SLC cache of 6–12 GB in addition to a dynamic SLC cache that covers several tens of GB. The 1TB and 4TB models we tested did not show any speed degradation, but the smaller models might be affected.

The majority of the extra space on the 9% over-provisioned 870 EVO is used for background block management and controller use. With a five-year warranty from Samsung and the ability to store up to 150TB of write data per 250GB of capacity, the 4TB model of the 870 EVO is capable of holding 2,400TB of writes during the warranty period.

The option to use TCG Opal 2.0-compliant AES 256-bit full disc encryption for those whose data needs additional security from prying eyes makes it potentially very secure in addition to being rated as durable.

Applications and Accessories

Samsung provides assistance to customers through the Samsung Magician SSD toolbox and data migration software for simple cloning. You can use Samsung Magician to read the S.M.A.R.T. data report on your SSD to check on its health. You can also upgrade the SSD’s firmware if necessary, perform a secure erase, and even benchmark your drives.