Customer Ratings & Reviews

Great drive for the price, it performs as it should. I'm using this to put games on, seeing on how games are getting larger and larger and so many great games coming out this year thought i would grab it just in case a shortage were to be in the future. I got it on sale for $169 which is a crazy good price for a Samsung not to mention a 2tb drive!

a great 2.5" SSD, great speeds and capacity for what I need, easy install and easy to move around. Very lightweight, and not all that fragile

This is the first refurb 2.5 ssd I’ve purchased from Best Buy, but I’ve purchased 3 refurbished nvme ssd’s prior to grabbing this one and there hasn’t been a lemon yet among them. I almost don’t want to oversell the refurb items at Best Buy, because it feels like this lucky money saving secret that if it caught on, could make the chances of getting one harder, or make them not as available , but that’s I know silly. If you’re at all considering an ssd and want more quality or quantity than the price of a new drive, I’d 100% recommend grabbing a refurb. Each of the many I’ve bought have been basically new. Great deal. Don’t spread the word!

Pros Fast Cheap Includes cloning tools RAPID Mode increases performance substantially Magician software includes a lot of features Cons Doesn’t include any adapter for cloning Doesn’t include screws if adding a new drive Not user friendly for first time installers It is becoming harder every day to justify buying a traditional hard drive. With drives such as the 870 EVO topping out at 8GB the argument of low capacity is no longer a barrier for most. SSDs also take up less space, are lighter, are faster, use less power, aren’t bothered by bumps, don’t make noise, and generate far less heat. Initial Impressions and Installation If you have already used Samsung SSD’s before things won’t look much different. It’s just a deceivingly light metal 2.5” drive and a pamphlet in the box. No cables, adapters, screws, or software included in the box. The instructions do point you to Samsung’s website for their Data Migration Wizard and Samsung Magician. If this is your first time installing a hard drive, be sure to do some research first on how to install. This is even more important if this is to be your OS drive. The reason is, even though it’s a retail kit, there is no adapter included for cloning or any screws for that matter. It does include Samsung’s own cloning software that you must download from their website. None of this is a big deal for an experienced system builder but might a little confusing for first timers. If you have a spare bay to install it, the process is overall pretty straightforward. Just install the drive and the Data Migration Assistant will, in most cases, recognize which drive is the old. You select the new drive and click one button. Usage and Performance For Samsung fans, the drive performs just as you would expect. In testing and usage the speed was very consistent. Without RAPID Mode disabled, sequential reads consistently stayed above 500MB/s with 4KB speeds being a more modest 33 to 35MB/s. Writes clocked in at 480MB/s or greater with 4KB write speeds hovering around 75MB/s. CrystalDiskMark turned in a 550MB/s read and 520MB/s write coming much closer to the stated 560 Mb/s read and 530 MB/s write. Samsung Magician offers a lot of extra features compared to other SSD makers, including integrated performance testing, diagnostics, encryption, and secure erase but the most useful utility for daily use is RAPID Mode. When turned on, Magician uses a portion of your RAM as a cache which in testing consistently returned speed results over 2000MB/s. Of course you can do the same thing with any third party caching system to boost performance and Windows already does this to some extend but what is nice is how Samsung includes it right within their software and doesn’t require any more than turning it on. Keep it on makes a noticeable difference during times, such as starting the computer, or repetitive tasks and overall makes the drive feel a lot faster than competitors that don’t offer such a feature out of the box. Samsung claims the TBW rating has been doubled compared to the 860 QVO series. Looking back at old articles, the 1TB 860 QVO was rated at 360TBW. According to Samsung’s website, the 870 QVO maintains the exact same 360TBW how they can claim it has been doubled is unclear. Similarly, both the old and the new drive have the same 3-year warranty. That said, overall SSD reliability seems to be better than that of a traditional hard drive and Samsung has a reputation of making reliable SSDs. There is no reason to believe the 870 QVO would be any different. Final thoughts It’s really hard to squeeze any more performance out of the SATA III interface, which is why the 870 QVO performance is nearly indistinguishable from the previous generation. What is nice to see is Samsung increasing storage capacity over the previous generation offering up to double the maximum storage of the 860 series. It seems thedays of traditional hard drives is rapidly coming to an end. If you are need of a SATA hard drive or a high capacity affordable SSD, the 870 QVO could server you well and likely for a very long time.

I put it in my PlayStation 4 and it runs almost like a ps5

Value. Next gen, up to date, and double the storage

I had this put in one of my laptops & it improves the speed of start up, online transactions & downloads of apps & content!

Great drive works great with my docking system I use it pretty often while working both on the go and at my desk.

Good price per gigabyte value with Samsung performance and reliability. Good real world write speed, but not as fast as benchmarks would lead you to believe. Great for large files, cache folders for media creation, huge photo collections and digital hoarders like me.

Samsung makes great stuff, pretty much across the board. This drive is no different. Nicely packaged, easy to open, and packaging and drive both had a really nice feel and look. Installation was simple and as advertised, the built in software automatically revealed to my Dell G5 gaming laptop bios. Install, return back-plate and screws, power up, partition drive and good to go. From an operating standpoint, it works as expected. It very quickly moves those one's and zeroes and stores them just as would be expected. In all, a solid choice if you want to say goodbye to the HDD and hello to the much faster and more reliable SSDD. Especially considering the 3 year warranty. In all, I would gladly recommend to a friend. **PLEASE NOTE** This product was provided to me at no cost in exchange for an honest and unbiased review. This review is exactly that: Honest and unbiased. The price played no role in the tone or honesty of this review.

I've been using SSDs of various interfaces and form factors (2.5" SATA III, mSATA, M.2 SATA, M.2 NVMe, PCIe expansion card, etc.) in DIY rigs and upgrades for myself and my family for nearly 9 years now; and regardless of the underlying technology, there's one constant that has always been true--going from a spinning hard drive to an SSD is about the most noticeable improvement you could EVER make to a PC, all other hardware being equal. This Samsung 870 QVO drive represents Samsung's second generation of higher capacity SSDs based around new, but somewhat controversial, QLC flash memory. Does the QVO make for an equally compelling upgrade as any other style/type of SSDs before it? Generally, the answer is yes, I suppose...but the jury is still out on just how good a value this drive will be for the long haul. You can read all about the pros and cons of QLC versus other types of memory if you wish, but a simplified elevator pitch is this: QLC represents a new storage architecture for SSDs that squeezes more bits onto the same sized chips. Practically speaking, this means larger SSDs can be made for less money...two areas where spinning hard drives ALWAYS held the advantage over faster yet more expensive SSDs. But this potential for higher capacity and lower cost comes with some fine print. First, because the bits are packed more tightly on the flash chips, write speeds may be a bit to a lot slower, especially after you've chewed through the available (much faster) cache memory the drive sets aside to speed up those write operations. Note, however, that the larger the drive you have (like 1TB or more), the less likely you are to consume all the available cache during any one disk operation (depending on how you're using your drive). Second, the drives are rated for fewer TBW (terabytes written) than those leveraging competing storage technology, which implies that QLC drives may give out sooner than a similarly sized SSD with a different type of memory inside. So what would all this mean to you? For starters, it SUGGESTS that a QLC drive might not be an ideal choice for something like your Windows/operating system's drive where large write operations are happening all the time (for fear of wearing out the drive sooner). But of course that outcome would depend on how often and how aggressively you use your computer in the first place. For example, if you don't create a lot of 4K videos or massive ISO images every day, you might well outgrow your PC before the drive ever starts to show signs of failure. Moreover, if you don't routinely work with HUGE files (i.e. larger than 1GB), you might never hit that point where you're trying to write a file to disk and exceed the available cache memory (at which point your write operations would definitely slow to a snail's pace). Honestly, then, many of the merits of a drive like the QVO may simply come down to economics...how badly to you need to economize on your purchase while still enjoying the speed boost you'll get from using an SSD in the first place, and will you notice any performance differences arising from the purposed weakness of QLC memory anyway? I put my own 870 QVO through its paces by matching it head-to-head against Samsung's 850 EVO 1TB 2.5" SSD; it's the exact same capacity drive in the exact same form factor as the new 870 QVO, and I've been using the 850 EVO as my primary Windows drive for about 5 years now. Now, I don't pretend to understand all the ins and outs of drive benchmarking because frankly I really don't care that much--and for a budget drive with high capacity like the QVO, I wasn't looking for the N'th degree of high performance anyway. But for those of you who care, I ran CrystalDiskMark and Samsung Magician's own benchmark tests on the two drives. The results attached below echo the common sentiments & findings floating around the net--yes, the QVO was observed to be a little slower than Samsung's older non-QLC drive in some areas of the benchmark tests--but not really by *that* much, and in terms of any meaningful differences, it certainly didn't feel like Windows was suddenly chugging along on the 870 QVO. Where I think the value proposition for something like the QVO really shines is if you want to have a large SSD data drive for things like games, documents, photos, etc.--a drive that gets a lot of read action, but you don't necessarily write/change the contents all that often, and not necessarily in huge chunks, either. In those cases, going with the 870 will save you on space, energy and noise over a similarly sized spinning hard drive; but you will DEFINITELY get the read/write speed bump that SSDs are known for. Unfortunately, for those unfamiliar with SSD migration or working with drives like these, the simplistic picture-book style instruction manual included with the 870 may lead one to believe their package was incomplete. If you intend to migrate your operating system from a spinning hard drive to the 870 QVO using Samsung's Data Migration tool (which is a separate download from Samsung Magician BTW), Samsung DOES make the process dead simple with that tool, but the manual suggests that a USB-to-SATA adapter cable will be necessary. It's also implied that one should have been in the box for you. In fact, all you get here is the bare drive...not even mounting screws. Of course, you can mount the drive internally in your PC using a regular SATA power connector and cable and still use the Samsung Data Migration tool, but for those of you looking to upgrade a laptop that doesn't have a spare 2.5" bay, you probably will need to obtain some sort of adapter unless you plan to simply reinstall Windows on the bare QVO drive upon power-up. Otherwise, the Samsung Magician companion app is a pretty user-friendly piece of software for drive maintenance and optimization. Magician can check your drive's firmware, over-provision the drive to improve long-term performance, enable RAPID mode to improve read/write performance (as I understand it, RAPID actually performs caching to speed up drive access similar to the way the QVO drive does already...it really didn't seen to make any noticeable difference outside of benchmarking), securely erase your drive, and manage encryption/decryption operations. Magician runs resident in the background, but other than providing a one-click interface for maintenance or ensuring your firmware is up-to-date, there are plenty of people who run Samsung drives without it. In the end, it's hard to make an unqualified recommendation for the 870 QVO. Yes, it's a slice of the "latest and greatest" trend in SSD storage, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's better than the alternatives (and in some cases, meaningfully so or not, it is definitely NOT as strong as the competition). But as a lower cost, higher capacity SSD, the 870 QVO still seems to have a place in today's SSD landscape, especially as capacities of drives with QLC memory start to grow well beyond 1-2 TB. So long as the economics match with your intended use case, the QVO is a fair to decent performer; but if you are concerned/paranoid about long-term durability or are seeking top-of-the-line access speeds, there are definitely better-performing drives on the market for the same or similar price.

I used this drive to replace my desktop's aging 1TB Barricuda hard disk drive and the speed difference is amazing! The setup was quick and easy, with connecting the drive to the system being very straightforward, connects just like the older hard drive! There is a huge amount of space for a great price and the companion program allows you to maintain a good eye on the performance and health of the drive to ensure your data is safe! The drive is very lightweight and feels sturdy. Also, this drive handles heat incredibly well! The outer shell is all metal and helps keep the drive cool for best performance! I would highly recommend this for someone whose computer does not have an NVMe M.2 slot or an older laptop, that is looking for fast speeds and reliable storage at a reasonable price!

Will start my review by admitting I have five Samsung SDD and NVMe m.2 drives in my machines to date. There are reasons for that as you may have deduced. They are rock-solid, dependable, and fast with excellent warranties. My first Samsung SSD has been quietly humming along for many years managing and storing my data, which leads me to trust the new installation of the 870 QVO will be here for many years delivering data storage. First response upon opening the packaging was my kid, “wow looks cool.” Samsung SSD’s have always had a polished look to their cases, a sign of the quality that lies within. They do look cool by the way. Samsung’s website claims they are “Achieving the maximum SATA interface limit of 560/530 MB/s sequential speeds” with the 870 QVO. Benchmarks run on CrystalDiskMark shows that the 870 QVO is pushing the data to the limit that SATA III allows. Absolutely great numbers from a SATA III SSD, especially running on an older gaming laptop I used for benchmarking. In fact, the benchmarks were the best I have seen on an SSD. OK, we all know Samsung drives are leaders in SSD/NVMe m.2 technology. So, what stands out with the 870 QVO drive? - Sequential Read Speed Up to 560 MB/sec - Sequential Write Speed Up to 530 MB/sec - Intelligent TurboWrite - 2,880 TBW double the previous model 860 QVO (TBW - Time between failure) - Three Year Warranty - Refinements to the ECC algorithm that enables stable performance - Samsung Magician – Best software for managing SSD drives on the market - Data Migration Software – move your stuff over with ease and confidence You make get the idea I like Samsung drives, well I do, they are fast superb performers and the 870 QVO is the latest in the lineup. Hands down the best performing SSD in my systems. Plus, they look cool!

The Samsung 870 QVO provides a good solid state drive with fast read/write speeds, its definitely a major upgrade from a standard laptop HDD. I tried the 870 two different ways to test out the speeds. First, I installed it into my PS4 Pro, copied my data and restored it onto the new SSD. The results were pretty impressive. I recorded the load times of 2 different games, first running them on the stock HDD, then running them on the new SSD. The first game I tried was God of War, I was surprised that the difference in this game wasn’t that much. The 870 loaded the game only 20 seconds faster than the original HDD. The second game is where I saw some major improvements. I then tried out Red Dead Redemption 2 and that game loaded a whole 1min and 21secs faster on the SSD compared to the original HDD. I wanted to fully test this new SSD out to see what other kinds of speeds I would be able to achieve, so I decided to install it into my laptop. Now My laptop has an M.2 running Windows 10 and a second standard HDD which holds all my games. So I wanted to copy just the secondary HDD to my new 870. This was not as easy as it was suppose to be. According to the Samsung website, this SSD has “updated migration software”, that lets you clone your old HDD to the new SSD. Unfortunately, this “upgraded migration software”, would not allow me to copy my secondary drive, It only lets you clone a Hard Drive with the operating system installed on it. In order to clone the drives, I had to use a stand alone Hard drive cloner which I had laying around. This process took me roughly about 3 hours to clone 150gb, but at least I was finally able to get it working. After I finally got the new SSD up and working, I wanted to try out Samsung’s Magician software. This software is suppose to optimize your drive’s performance, check the drive’s health status, update the firmware of the SSD, also it is suppose to let you erase the drive back to the factory settings. Clearly, this software has not received an update to fully support the new 870 QVO. When I tried the secure erase feature, it wouldn’t let me do it, everything was greyed out. The software did detect that I had a 870 QVO, it displayed my drive’s serial number as well as the information. I was able to use the performance optimizer, which is as simple as selecting your drive and pushing optimize. It seemed to make it run a little faster when launching games, although I didn’t time it. The last thing I did run was the benchmark test on the new SSD. I did run the test on my old HDD as well as my M.2 and the number seemed to be pretty accurate. For my old HDD I was getting a read/write speeds of 116/112. For the M.2 I was getting a read/write speeds of 1599/978. But for the Samsung SSD I got a read/write speeds of 5653/5787...Obviously, these numbers are inaccurate, and I think its a case of the software not supporting the new SSD fully. Overall, I am satisfied with the 870 QVO. My games now load faster, which enhances my experience. I am a little disappointed that the Migration software didn’t work as expected for me, but maybe that will be updated in the near future. I would recommend this SSD to anyone looking to update their old HDD, or if you’re looking to buy a new SSD.

I use Samsung SSDs almost exclusively in all of my PCs, including gaming machines. My 2TB 860 EVO is almost full, so I was excited to receive this 870 QVO to expand my gaming storage. For general use and game storage, this drive is perfectly fine and will offer a dramatic improvement over traditional mechanical hard drives. However, power users will want to be aware of some of the drive's limitations. PROS: - Speeds are very fast, pretty much as fast as you can get from a SATA interface. As you can see from the attached screenshot, sequential read/write speeds are in excess of 500 MB/s. Random read/write speeds are slower, but that is simply the nature of these drives. For general day-to-day computing and storage of games or media files, these speeds are great and infinitely better than a standard mechanical drive. - The 870 QVO is offered in sizes up to 8 TB, which is unheard of in a 2.5" SSD. CONS: - Due to the nature of QLC flash, the endurance of this drive is lower than other models that cost just a bit more. "Endurance" refers to how much data can be written to a drive before it eventually fails. The endurance of this drive (the 1 TB model) is rated at 360 TB -- which is a ton of data for the average user, but might not last quite long enough for power users like video editors. The 4 TB model increases this dramatically to an endurance of 1440 TB, but these numbers are still lower than Samsung's EVO lineup of drives which use a different type of flash. OVERALL: Honestly, there are practically no downsides to this drive for 99% of users. For those who frequently work with very large files and transfer a ton of data every day, then the lower endurance of these QVO drives might mean the drive will fail sooner. But for everyone else, that is a non-issue and this drive will last a very long time and provide plenty of speed. Recommended!

To start this review it is important to understand these concepts related to SSD’s: SLC: Single-Level Cells; one bit per memory cell. These are the fastest and most reliable memory for an SSD. MLC: Multi-Level Cell; two bits per memory cell. These are the second fastest and reliable memory for an SSD. TLC: Triple-Layer Cell; three bits per memory cell. These are the third fastest and reliable memory for an SSD. QLC: Quad-Level Cell; four bits per cell. These are the slowest and least reliable memory for an SSD. TWB: Terabytes written; the number of terabytes that can be written before the drive fails. The Samsung 870 QVO is a 1 TB QLC SSD with a 42 GB SLC cache. The TBW is 360. The warranty is 3 years. The advantage of QLC SSD’s is they can pack a larger size memory into a small package. You can get this drive in 1TB, 2TB, 4TB and 8TB (first SSD at 8TB I believe). As the drive uses the SATA III connection, it is limited to a 6 GB/sec transfer rate. Its packaging is as most SSD’s of this type are. There is no SATA cable provided. There are no screws provided to connect it to a drive bay. My current PC set up is 480GB MLC SSD for my boot drive; 1TB platter drive for my files; and, 1TB platter drive for my back up drive. This Samsung 870 QVO is to replace my files drive. Samsung has data migration software as many other drive manufacturers do. I went to the Samsung website and downloaded the data migration software. It installed fine. However, you can only migrate the data from a drive (clone) with an operating system on it. This would not work for me. I found another free alternative called Mini Tool Partition Wizard. My files drive had just over 500GB and it took about 3 hours to clone the drive to the Samsung SSD. It is working fine so far. Conclusion – With QLC memory and the price of the 1TB, there are cheaper SSD’s out there with a 5 year or even 10 year warranty. If you are looking for SSD larger than 2TB, the 870 QVO is worth a look. So based on the 1TB version I rate it 3 stars for the QLC and warranty and 0 stars for the data migration tool as it did not work for me at all. So a total rating of 3 stars seems appropriate for the 1TB version.

The Samsung 870 QVO SSD 1TB is Samsung's latest SSD and retails for 129.99 MSRP. I didn't have a desktop to install as an internal drive but i have a SATA 3 to USB 3.1 Gen 2 enclosure to use this SSD drive as an external. And the performance was unexpectedly great. I tested the speeds and got Write: 416.6 mb/s and Read: 431.2 mb/s. Very fast as an external. These numbers will be higher if I used it as an internal. According to Samsung, this drive's specs include: Specs include: Read: Up to 560 MB/sec Write: Up to 530 MB/sec Form Factor: 2.5 inch Interface: SATA 6 Gbps Interface (Compatible with SATA 3 Gbps & 1.5 Gbps Interfaces) Cache Memory: Samsung 1GB Low Power DDR4 SDRAM This is a great drive. Overall, I am happy with this.

TLDR: This is a solid every day SSD, but there are other options. I benchmarked this drive on Crystal Disk Mark 7 which I would consider near best case benchmark. The fastest test (Seq1M Q8T1) returned 550MB/s reads and 486.77MB/s writes. The worst case test (RND4K Q1T1) pull 38.5MB/s reads and 98.09MB/s writes, which sounds bad, but I've tested NVME drives that only pull mid 40s read and low 100s writes. These are still good numbers! Where it’s not so great is with large files. If you deal with lots of large files, I would stay away from the QVO and QLC based drives in general. The 870QVO 1TB has a limited about of SLC write cache, which means the speeds look great up to a point, then crash and burn. To test this, I copied a 56GB hard drive image from another SSD I have to this one. It averaged around 450MB/s until the SLC cache was full, then it plummeted to 70-80MB/s for the last 12 or so GB of the file. The full copy averaged 245MB/s. To wrap up, if you need a drive for your ballooning games folders or need an decent everyday SSD from a great brand, this will work for you. If you move around large files all the time, (media editing, or local media consumption) you might want to keep looking!

Bought this SSD to upgrade my iMac that had a fusion drive. I saved thousands of dollars upgrading my iMac with a SSD instead of buying the latest iMac. The performance is as good as a new computer for what I use it for! It's really amazing how fast the computer operates with a SSD. I haven't seen the beach ball since upgrading it. Shaved 60 seconds on boot up time and apps pull up quick!

If you're looking for an SSD - there's really not a better option than this. Ridiculous speed, and Samsung reliability (I've bought several of their drives - without an issue). Replacing a 'traditional' drive? Be prepared to be blown away by the improvement in boot-up time, and performance.