Had only a 128gig for Windows 10 but as most of you know overtime that OS has got larger and I did not want W11 buy getting an M.2 do got this and works fine and fast enough starting windows at less than 30seconds.

Samsung SSD 870 EVO are reliable, as they can withstand sudden power loss (when using a journalling filesystem), and have the best TBW (terabytes written) value among the top tier of similar products. The performance is enough to saturate the fastest SATA bus. It is likely to be about 10x faster than the old drive you are replacing, and about 3x-6x slower than a NVMe drive on PCIe bus. Basically, if the old computer can’t boot up from an NVMe, then this product is the best. As usual, always get a drive slightly larger than you need, because the reliability is proportional to the capacity in these devices (about 600TBW per 1TB).

My pc was running really slow and noisy so my nephew suggested replacing hard drive. Apparently, though a bit concerned he assured me it was simple and would simply transfer all my data.
He was spot on when he said these Samsung drives are brilliant and easy to install.

My drive had 29 days uptime and 20TB of writes according to samsung magician. Not a huge data volume given its rated for something like 1800TB and a full test showed no faults or leftover files. But someone had been using this drive until I guess they returned it under the 30 day returns window so you might want to check yours if these things are important to you.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way, It’s a Sata drive, So up to 560mbs Read and 530mbs Write,

If you want it ro be fastest you could buy two and used it as a software Raid, Then you get double the speed,

But why when you could just buy a 4tb PCIE3.0 m.2 that’s 6x the speed for the same price for a different manufacturer?

Because simply old laptops/ Pc’s and last generation consoles don’t have an M.2 slot so you can’t use them and sata is the only option,

On the drive itself the 4tb 870 evo is excellent for a sata drive, It has dram inside 4gb infact, That’s like 2008 levels of ram in a top end pc of that time,

Why 4* rather than 5* you might ask?,

Actually plugging the drive in my pc only to run disk manager to format it and well… it could only format it to 2tb rather that 4tb but the remaining 2tb that was an not yet allocated couldn’t be merged into the volume,

The only solution I had was to remove the 870 evo plug in my sata to usb 3.1 cable I’ve had laying about for the past year and formatting as an external drive,

That worked then once that was done I then put it back in my pc to format once again,

I know I said at the start of this review that it’s just a sata drive,

But for most people that’s all you would ever need,

I have a 4tb firecuda 530 PCIE4.0 as my boot drive and this 4tb 870 evo is no where near the speed of that, But in games it’s identical for load times,
With certain games that are out in 2023 with the Direct storage api and now with NVIDIA RTX IO that will be out with rachet & clank rift apart on pc very soon ssd storage will be used to it’s full potential, Much like the near instant load times on the Playstation 5,

With direct storage and rtx io what’s the difference between 1 second with a PCIE4.0 ssd compared to 1.4 seconds to a sata ssd for game load times?,

You can’t even blink your eyes at 0.3 seconds,

Anyway for a summary,

Positive

+ 5 years of warranty
+ It doesn’t use QLC memory cells unlike the 870qvo

+78 GB cache size so you get full transfer speeds ( Most 4k video files are less than that)

Negative

= it’s a sata drive so if you do alot of 4k video editing at 60fps or 120fps then a PCIE4.0 would be better as the faster the drive you have the better really,

– My only personal issue of a brand new 4tb 870 evo not being able to format to the full capacity of the drive unless I used a cable to use it as an external drive to format it, If I didn’t already have that cable in my draw it would of been a problem,

Final summary,

I personal use this 4tb 870 evo as a steam game storage and pc games pass storage,

Why? Because some mad drivers in my area who like to crash into virgin media fiber cabinets and I’m left with no Internet for 10+ days and I don’t want to use my precious mobile data for game downloads because mobile data companies hate it when you use youe phone as a hotspot because apparently 600gb of 4/5g data is now somehow unlimited, And well we all know games are big now like 100gb + some are even 200gb,

If you can pick up a 4tb ssd for a decent price it’s worth it,

I wouldn’t worry at all about games that use direct storage in the future because the difference between PCIE4 or 5 or even Sata ssd will be less that a 2 seconds because the graphics card in your PC will be doing the decompression of the data

As expected, a SSD that just worked out of the box and seems to have good speed. Did not use the transfer software as this was an additional drive.

Replaced the 1TB HDD in a Lenovo M83 SFF, had the SSD fitted into a Sabrent adapter and into the HDD bay, and had Windows 10 installed in less than an hour from a USB installation drive. The SSD is faster to load and to transfer files between partitions, but Windows updates take as long as they always take 🙂 The reason for this upgrade was because I had reverted to Windows, from Debian 11, Bullseye, and Windows, since Windows 8.1, is very aggressive with its HDD access. This is noisy and can hog resources, right when you need them. This is no longer an issue, with this Toshiba SSD 🙂

Beware, bought the 2TB EVO 870 SSD as Amazon was promoting a Samsung promotion, 30 reclaim on this product. The Samsung website will not accept the serial number even though the correct S/N has been resent numerous times, and with several variations.

Update:
Out of curiousity I re-tried the Samsung promotion the following day, no changes made to the S/N from the previous day, this time it was accepted. It would seem that the Samsung promotion website is a bit ‘hit n miss’, you may have to keep retrying the website if you are taking advantage of the promotion!

I have adjusted my rating to a 4 (from a 1) as other Samsung SSD’s I have had in the past have been no issue.

Quick summary

– Lasts **27 days** if you run UserBenchmark testing 24/7.
– Lasts 35.4 years if you run Win10 OS drive with a swap file 24/7.
– Lasts 53.2 years if you run Win10 OS drive without a swap file 24/7.
– Lasts 100+ years in real life conditions working on a computer 9-16 hours a day and power cycling once or twice a day.

**results calculated without taking into account the 10% over-provisioning I’m using, so actual lifespan will be higher

Detailed summary

My 9 year old Samsung 830 SSD, used solely as operating system drive, was running out of space. Windows Search’s database (a lifesaver for me) was approaching 60GB in size pushing my small 128GB SSD near its capacity limits. The 830’s performance was still rock solid and its health was at 80% after 9 years of almost daily use. So decided to purchase this 1TB Samsung Evo 870.

Cloning

I used Samsung’s disk cloning tool to migrate the operating system. This caused me some stress. I noticed not all files were copied. Specifically: my Outlook PST files and Windows’ search database were missing. I worried system files might also have failed to clone so undertook a set of windows checks using SFC and DISM. They all came out clean. Turns out, if you use Samsung’s software, you need to ensure all programs are closed (my Outlook was – but a tray icon was still running probably locking the PST files) and if you want Windows Search databases copied, you must temporarily disable Windows Search. Wish this had been clearer upfront which would have avoided my rebuilding the Search database.

Then came the SSD writes shock

After checking the drive for issues with Samsung Magician, cloning the OS, and completing a tests with UserBenchmark, I was shocked to discover that in 15 Power on Hours (PoH) I had already eaten through 306 GB of SSD writes! The drive was new with 0 GB writes, how could this be possible? At this rate, it was going to last 3.4 years with 24/7 use.

I thought something was wrong with the drive so began recording SSD writes vs. PoH and testing different scenarios.

First, I moved Windows’ swap file to a 12TB HGST helium drive. This instantly ‘fixed’ the SSD writes and I incorrectly concluded Windows was chewing up my drive. Spent a few days reading up about the problem and trying to figure out solutions.

I then decided to test my PC again with UserBenchmark to see what impact having a swap file on a separate HDD was having. I could not believe it: one test burnt off 30GB in SSD writes!! So the culprit was not Windows but the five or six UserBenchmark tests I had completed after cloning the drive.

I placed the swap file back onto my C: drive and sure enough SSD writes were not increasing at alarming rates. I also read that Windows will not let HDDs with a swapfile spin down and sleep, so another reason to leave the swap file on the SSD.

Thanks to all the data points I recorded, I can now estimate that this drive will last 35.4 years powered on continuously, or 102.8 years at the rate that I am using my computer.

So a highly recommend from me.