Remember SATA? We haven’t talked about the older storage standard since M.2 became popular, but there are still a large number of SATA SSDs on the market. Samsung’s 870 EVO SSD family is Samsung’s latest hardware iteration to serve this market, and several online reviews today attest to the overall effectiveness of the product.
The question of whether to use a SATA or an M.2 SSD is an interesting example of an area where benchmarks can be accurate and still not convey the experience of using a product. The practical differences between the daily use of an M.2 drive and a SATA drive tend to be inconspicuous. If your daily usage patterns involve a lot of heavy copies of data, you will probably benefit from an M.2, but if not, you can save some money and maximize available capacity by choosing a SATA drive. A 2.5 ″ case offers much more space for NAND ICs than an M.2 stick.
We gathered PCMag, PCWorld and Hot Hardware reviews to see what people have to say. Everyone praises this new family of drives. The 870 EVO is based on Samsung’s triple bit V-NAND (TLC) and is being released with capacities of 250 GB ($ 49), 500 GB ($ 80), 1 TB ($ 139), 2 TB ($ 269) ) and 4 TB ($ 529). The price per GB ranges from 20 cents on the 250 GB drive to 13 cents on the 4 TB drive. All of these units have a five-year warranty.
PCMaghttps image: //www.pcmag.com/reviews/samsung-ssd-870-evo
One reason to buy a SATA SSD instead of an M.2 drive is the price difference. Looking at previous drives, Samsung’s 1TB 860 EVO 2.5 ″ SSD costs $ 109 at Newegg, while its M.2 counterpart – which also uses SATA 6G signaling, even if it fits in an M.2 slot – costs $ 149. Although M.2 drives perform better than their SATA counterparts, the difference in commercial software may not be large. (Artificial tests on sequential read / write performance will always favor M.2 units).
According to PCMag, “[T]The Samsung SSD 870 EVO proved to be not only a leader among SATA drives, but also a regular competitor with PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 4.0 based NVMe M.2 drives. While both standards are great for what they do (hitting all-time sequential throughput records), their added bandwidth does not always translate into better 4K random read and write scores, which is the large percentage of buyers SSDs in this category tend to be more concerned. “
The performance numbers to which they refer can be seen below:
Separately, PCWorld notes that while the 870 EVO and 870 QVO offer similar performance in many ways, the 870 EVO can maintain its high performance, even when recording huge single files. The 870 QVO is a QLC NAND drive that relies on an SLC cache to maintain performance at acceptable levels. This is a common method of improving SSD performance when using QLC NAND, but when the SLC cache runs out, the unit’s performance drops substantially.
Image by PCWorld
The 870 EVO does not have this problem. Again, how often you find it depends on how many huge file writes you regularly make, but these are the scenarios where an MLC or TLC drive proves its worth on a QLC + SLC cache device.
In this case, the conclusions are straightforward. Hot Hardware writes: “If you need a high-capacity, high-performance SATA SSD and want something from a well-respected brand with a long history in the market, the Samsung SSD 870 EVO series should be at the top of your short list. ”PCWorld says:“ The Samsung 870 EVO easily has the best performance in its class and top performance in any class in all usage scenarios. ” PCMag writes that the 870 EVO “should be at the top of the list for anyone who wants the best combination of performance, product quality and price in a 2.5 inch”.
If you’re trying to figure out whether to buy a SATA SSD or an M.2 SSD, here’s ExtremeTech’s advice: If you’re happy with the I / O performance of your current SATA SSD, don’t be afraid to save a few bucks when choosing SATA, especially if you need to cut costs or if you want to invest in a better CPU or GPU. If you want to maximize capacity and are satisfied with the current performance, don’t be afraid to choose a larger SATA drive instead of a smaller M.2. If you are still on an old hard drive and have postponed the upgrade because SATA is old and your motherboard does not support M.2, forget about it and buy a SATA SSD. Switching from an HDD to an SSD is one of the few guaranteed ways to improve performance even on an old machine.
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