68 PCWorld MARCH 2021REVIEWS SAMSUNG 870 EVO SATA SSD
five-year warranty is invalid once you exceed
the TBW rating. Most end users won’t come
close to writing that much data, so you can
consider it five years.
The 870 EVO uses Samsung’s TurboWrite
variable secondary cache algorithm, in which
the main NAND is treated as SLC by writing
only a single bit per voltage level. That should
allow top write performance until the drive
nears full capacity. As a rule of thumb, you
should stay below 75 percent of capacity
when using SSDs or performance will suffer.PERFORMANCE
The 870 EVO proved to be the fastest overall
SATA SSD we’ve tested so far, largely due to its
superior performance with small files. We’re
not talking the same kind of difference you’ll
see with far faster NVMe technology—6GbpsSATA itself is the limiting technology. Numbers
are very similar for all top-tier SATA drives. That
said, the 870 EVO will cut a second or two offSustained reading and writing are limited by the
SATA bus, hence the statistically meaningless
differences shown here. But check the 450GB test
to see where the 870 QVO falls behind.Sequential Write (Q=32, T=1)
530
530531CrystalDiskMark 6
MBps
Samsung 870 EVO Samsung 870 QVO
Seagate Barracuda SSD Seagate 110 IronWolf534
Sequential Read (Q=32, T=1)
562
562563564
LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCESamsung’s 870 EVO is
a step up from the 870
QVO in terms of overall
performance, albeit at a
higher price.