Samsung 860 QVO 2TB SSD Hands-On and Benchmarks

Samsung has recently revealed their latest Samsung 860 QVO SSD with capacities of up to 4TB. We managed to get a hold of the 2TB variant and we’ve been using it for the better part of last month.

This portable SSD has multiple uses — it can be the primary drive for your desktop PC, an upgrade to the internal drive of your aging laptop, or use it as an external drive for portable storage when paired with an enclosure. For our purpose, we’re using it as the primary drive for our editing rig.

Test Setup

Our standard rig setup is our video editing PC at the studio. It run on a Gigabyte X299 Aorus Gaming 3 motherboard, Intel i7-7740X processor, and 16GB of G.Skill Trident Z Memory. This is the same machine we used to run the Samsung 970 Pro 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD last year so we should be able to make a comparison between the two and how they perform between each other.

We use this rig to run Windows 10 with Adobe Premiere for photo and video editing.

Performance and Benchmarks

Samsung claims a sequential read and write speeds of up to 550 megabytes per second (MB/s) and 520 MB/s, respectively, the 860 QVO achieves the same level of performance as today’s 3-bit MLC SSD, thanks to Samsung’s latest 4-bit V-NAND and the proven MJX controller.

We took note of this and ran our own benchmarks.

HD Tune Pro gave it an average transfer rate of 450MB/s.

CrystalDiskMark showed 563MB/s and 532MB/s read and write speeds which is a little bit higher that what Samsung claims so it’s spot on.

Disk Speed Test gave it a 524MB/s and 501MB/s read and write speed.

Of the three tests, only the CrystalDiskMark showed very close results to what Samsung is claiming the top speed of this SSD. Of course, these tests have different parameters so we reckon Samsung’s methodology is similar to the latter.

Conclusion

So far, we’ve gotten good results from the Samsung 860 QVO. The storage capacities are generous (can go up to 4TB) and the pricing is reasonable. It’s one of the best SSDs around to use when you want to upgrade your system to a faster and more realiable storage.

The Samsung 860 QVO is available in 1TB, 2TB and 4TB capacities. The 1TB retails for $149 while our test unit which is 2TB retails for $249.99 and the 4TB at $499.99.

No local pricing at the moment but we will update this story once we get them.