Customer Ratings & Reviews

This review will be in two parts, one an overview of SSD and a review for a PC user, and the second part where I think the QVO line shines best – as a fast external drive for a gaming console. First, a quick note, this SSD needs a standard 2.5” SATA laptop bay to work correctly. It can also work in a desktop, so long as it can accept a 2.5” drive or you have an adapter kit. Many laptops now have physically smaller PCIe or SATA m2 drives (or are completely integrated flash that is not user replaceable) and this drive will not fit in those laptops. Now, on to the review. Solid State Drives (SSDs) are the latest in large storage technology. Traditional hard drives use a spinning metal platter and a mechanical read/write head that moves across the platters to read or write data, kind of like a very small record player. These mechanical components wear, make noise, and take a lot of power to keep running. They are also very sensitive to being jostled or taking damage when dropped. All of these things are bad for portable computing. They also have the disadvantage of the time it takes for the read write head to find the data on the platter. When files are scattered on the drive, this problem is even worse, and can lead to a performance drain on your system while all of the data is fetched from all over the drive. SSDs solve many of these issues by using chips instead of the platters, and they have no moving parts (hence the solid). Their major drawback is that over time the chips will wear and won’t be able to flip between a 1 and a 0, so they will eventually wear out. As anyone who has heard the click of death in a failed traditional hard drive knows, drive failure will happen to any technology eventually and you should always have backups. The Samsung QVO line uses a new type of process to make the flash chips that store the data on an SSD. This process is cheaper, but ends up being a little slower, especially on write speeds. For most home users, especially those looking to add a spark to older laptops by replacing their old and slow spinners, the limits on write speeds are not likely to be very noticeable and the lower cost will be welcome instead of sinking more money into a more expensive drive that the system and use cases can’t really max out. In laptops, this drive will certainly make a huge difference if upgrading from a spinning hard drive. The high data rates and lack of seek lag will result in an older laptop that feels new and fresh and will gain some longevity. It can also help offset a system with less RAM as it can find a deliver data so much faster to the system. More RAM is always better, but again if looking to add life to an older system, an SSD can help, and minimizing the investment in an older system is always welcome and that is where the QVO line really shines. Now, on to a different use case. These SSDs are perfect for throwing into an external hard drive enclosure and using with a gaming console as a secondary drive. Consoles have data transfer limits and don’t do a lot of rapid writing to drives, so the limits of the QVO line are less apparent and their lower cost is a big benefit. Currently, I have a 4TB external 5400rpm spinner attached to an Xbox One X, so it already has the benefits of an external drive, but does this SSD make it even faster? The answer is yes, in most cases. To test, I copied some test games to the SSD, unplugged it, and did a full system restart and measured some load times for games off of the external spinner. For the SSD test, again, I reloaded the console to clear the memory and measured the load times. Some games, like Fortnite, took about as long to load to the menus and lobby, but I was consistently the first player on the launch island and there were no issues with late texture pop-ins, muddy textures, or late game object loads. Other games really showed an improvement. Skyrim SE, which is a very “fetchy” game due to the huge item and graphic assets, saw a performance gain to the menu and loading a save, and was generally more snappy with fewer loading hitches while wandering. Forza Horizon 4 was a massive improvement, nearly half the time to the main menu (42 seconds vs 1:10), and loading into the game was somehow insanely quick, 25 seconds vs 1:29 on the spinner. I know Horizon is joining an online session, so I think some of the delay on the spinner was the matchmaking, but still, it’s clear the SSD really gives a big benefit to the game. If you are looking for the lowest price in an SSD with enough performance for most home users, the new QVO line should be something that is considered. These drives are ideally positioned to breath new life into older laptops, budget PC builders, or as an add on external drive for a gaming console.

This is my third hard drive in 7 years. I hope that this one will last a bit longer than 2 years!

Do your research on Samsung's QVO drives before purchasing. If you are planning on using this product for transferring large files consistently or rendering video edits, DO NOT use this SSD. The advertisement claims approx. 550mbs read/write, but when the cache buffer is full the write speed will drop by half or more. If you transfer any file above 10-15GB the transfer rate slows dramatically. I'm a video editor and purchased two 2tb SSDs to create a RAID0 drive. My write speeds started at 880mbs, but dropped down to 130mbs. The total transfer time came out to 2 hours. This is a complete waste! I strongly recommend to not use these drives for large files or video storage...I will be returning both drives!

Having a 2TB SSD is amazing. In the past, I have had systems with either an SSD for the operating system, and a standard HDD for my typical file storage, or two SSDs. Having everything on one drive is AMAZING. The Physical installation of the drive in my laptop was easy and simple, taking only about 5 minutes. Installing windows 10 took about 9 minutes, and that was it. Boot times are around 10 seconds. Do yourself a favor, if you have an old computer that you like, and it has at least 8 GB of RAM, upgrade to an SSD (laptop or desktop).

The hard drive gave me troubles since the very first day. It was difficult to load windows. Over the next 5 or 6 weeks, I would experience occasional blue screens without knowing the problem. After eliminating every source recently, I boiled it down to the motherboard and the hard drive. The ASUS motherboard kept telling me a device connected to the motherboard needed to be repaired. I attached a different hard drive; and, viola, the motherboard recognized the new hard drive. I would have been better off throwing $400 down the sewer!

I think the situation most of us in this day and age are going to find ourselves in when we are PC gamers, or just PC enthusiasts in general, is that we have upgraded our PCs in many ways but we're still running our boot drive off of an old mechanical disk. Or for those of us a little more recent, and/or forward thinking we're using an SSD as our boot drive but it's a small drive. That's where this drive comes into play. Finally after a good long time of hanging around SSD finally has started to drop in price to be a lot more reasonable and this is mostly due to new technology. The new QVO technology stands for, I believe, quad level cell. Without going into too much of the technicalities of it, bottom line is that it makes older SSDs cheaper and gives us a much cheaper way to integrate an SSD drive into our system. But I know what you're thinking: I really don't feel like installing a new drive, installing Windows 10 and then moving and setting up all of my stuff again! Great news: You don't have to! This drive alleviates, at least for me, the biggest concern when replacing a boot drive and that is "how do you replace the boot drive without a huge hassle?" It comes with cloning software that bit for bit copies all of the drive, as opposed to file by file. File by file copying will not work for Windows operating systems in regards to being part of the boot sector because data in the boot sector is not made up of files but rather a lower level data which is not copied when you do a file by file copy. But the bottom line is you really don't have to understand all of it but understand that this is the most simple way to replace your boot drive. Here are the steps: 1. Install the QVO drive to your PC, or if you're out of slots or using a laptop that has no second drive bay (like me) you put this drive into an external case (make sure to buy one if you'll need it, they are pretty cheap). In face, for me I simply used the SATA interface to USB portion and didn't even use the case since it was a temporary issue. 2. Partition and format the new QVO drive. 3. Download the Samsung software onto one of your current drives. 4. Run the software and select your source drive (current boot) and your target drive (new QVO) and then let it go. For me I had a 2.0 USB interface and to transfer about 256Gb took nearly 3 hours. If you have a 3.0 USB interface it will be much quicker of course. 5. When it is complete swap out, or replace, your old drive with the new QVO drive. If you're going to use both drives then simply go into BIOS and tell your PC which drive to use to boot off of. In my case I just removed the old drive from my laptop, installed my new QVO drive and then started up the computer. And voila, it booted to Windows 10 login in about 2 seconds (no exaggeration) versus the old 30 seconds, I input my credentials and was into Windows 10 and everything was just like it used to be, only faster. After having used the system for about 2 weeks now I have had no issues at all, everything is just so much faster. So do I recommend this drive? HECK YES I DO! Because of the ease of the Samsung software making what typically can be a weekend affair into a 10 minute one (less the hours spent copying of course) means this drive is a life saver. The Samsung software can be used just so one of the two drives is a Samsung. So if you bought a new drive that was not Samsung you would not be able to use this software unless the other, older drive was Samsung. I don't know about all of that but I do know that Samsung is my new hero for creating a super fast, speedy drive that is incredibly easy to install, setup and get running as a replacement for an older mechanical boot drive. That's huge in my book! As for the performance, well my Warhammer game that used to take about 3 1/2 minutes to get into the game now takes about 20 seconds. So I think that summarizes what sort of game changer you're going to see when it comes to going from an old 5400 RPM drive to a new state-of-the-art SSD drive. So in conclusion, if you need to replace your C drive but are apprehensive about the entire process, or simply dreading doing it all, get this drive as it makes it super, duper easy!! And if you just need a fast drive, then this is one that fits the bill as well! HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!!!

I have a Server that has multiple back up options, and I wanted to setup a monthly back up for a specific folder that has about 1.3 TB of data. it does the job perfectly in a relatively short amount of time. I totally recommend this 2TB QVO SSD for back up options and less than a daily use.

I returned this SSD because it overheats and it seems it’s like that for this type of devices.

Was easy to instal into my desktop. Just needed a bracket that allows a 2.5 to fit into a 3.5 slot. My only grip is that this did not include screws to screw this in. But if his makes a difference with games when loaded on this SSD compared to a HDD 7200 rpm drive.

Failed within a year an a half of light use. Very few writes.

Picked this up because I was tired of having multiple SSD's and thought it would be nice to have everything on one drive. Read/Write Speeds are consistently in the 500's as long as you are moving a small amount of data thanks to the QVO tech. Up to like 12gb of data you get good speeds and then it drops hard after that. Moving large video files of the threshhold shows slow downs to 100mb/s or slower. If you take this drive for what it is, an excellent steam game drive then it is perfect for that. If you are looking for a boot drive or something to be constantly moving stuff to and from this isn't it. I have an 850 evo sata ssd still as my boot drive and chose to use the QVO drive as a perma game drive. Installation was simple no frills packaging no screws or mounts included. Does what it says it does I'm just less than impressed with the QVO tech aka poor man's SSD.

Bad and it wouldn’t boot and had to do driver repair and doesn’t work

I have heard a lot of fantastic things about the Samsung 860 QVO SSD and I was so looking forward to all it would do to lessen booting time and program loading time and speed up internet surfing, etc. I have an older HP laptop that could use a huge boost. Not the fault of the SSD at all, but alas, I was so disappointed... when I was removing the 15 screws from the back of my laptop, the very last one refused to be loosened/removed! That was it... after watching instructional videos online and reading up so that I felt comfortable enough to swap out my HDD for a SSD... project over. I will purchase a SATA-> USB adapter so that I can give this a shot externally while I ponder what to do with that darned screw! I will come back and update this review.

Amazing SSD, great speeds and still working hard till this day.

It died on me after 3 years. Seemed to be really good until it died just outside of warranty.