After some deliberation between going for a new hard drive and a solid state drive, we pumped for an SSD. This Samsung SSD, offers good value (there are cheaper names that I’ve never heard of and definitely more expensive ones as well). Spent quite a long time comparing the speeds and things like that. Ultimately, the difference appear to be negligible certainly for the reasonably casual gaming usage that we are doing. definitely felt comfort in going for a known name (as someone fairly new to self build PCs).

The drive was easy to install after watching a couple of quick YouTube videos, but I would be aware that you may need a longer connecting cable depending on the positioning of your components inside your tower. However, these are dirty and Natalie bailable too much about it if you do need one.

Down loaded Samsung Magician, plug in usb to sata cable and cloned old drive 1st time, with the 2nd drive just fitted it and formatted as usual. great value and quality you’d expect from Samsung.

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

Not much to say here, most of the other reviews are showing what needs to be shown. The 870 Evo pretty much saturates the SATA6Gbps bus, but aside from this, these drives are great for random IO performance versus their cost. They’ll have the longevity too (as long as not in server applications but even then, their endurance is huge).

Never had a failure in my possession and I’ve been purchasing since the 830 and when they were 250 for a 256GB – almost a pound per GB. I still have an 830 drive right now, it’s in use on a fairly modern laptop. This modern laptop has had an 850 Evo, 860 Evo and 870 Evo, but now has the 830 as it’s not my main laptop anymore, just a tertiary one. I struggled to notice any real world difference between any of these SSDs. I’m sure there are differences but they’ll be fractions of seconds – not seconds.

Reliability is the king though and as I’ve bought 100’s of these models over the years (100’s of every Evo/general model Samsung have released) to use in various client and customer laptops, not one is yet to fail as far as I know.

Samsung’s selling point is that it’s all made under one roof – all of the silicon components – CPU, DRAM, the storage silicon, everything. As you may know, most other brands use different branded components within their SSDs. Not that I’ve seen any big issues over the last 5 or 6 years with other brands – everything is pretty ironclad these days with controllers, firmware, etc etc. But with Samsung there’s no guess games or testing – you know it’ll be solid right off the bat and their endurance rating will be credible. Harder to estimate this when using components from different manufacturers. For that reason alone I’ve always just stuck to Samsung for my SSD needs, whether the SATA models or the NVMe models.

The Magician software simplifies firmware management, the clone tool is great if needed (most I.T. technicians will be recovering images via other means anyway).

I feel they’ve always been competitively priced – I know other brands do price more aggressively but in the grand scheme of things, I feel that data shouldn’t have a price (or not too large a price). The Samsung drives are still competitively priced with that in mind. And I do feel that with real-world workflows, the superiority of the Samsung drives can be felt at times over other budget brands – especially under random loads and I think Samsung’s great processor design comes into play here. Other brands have always been playing catch-up with this – Samsung have always headlined.

Recommended for use in anything you need storage in this form factor – external USB chassis (they’re GREAT for external drives – they’ll beat off even the best USB flash drives once they’re in a quality USB 3.0 chassis), game consoles, computers and laptops, iMacs & MacBooks (SATA only), NAS drives for either storage or caching. I honestly believe that unless for mass storage, the hard disk drive has no place anymore.