We do ten runs of our real-life test suite, with a pause between each test and a reboot after every full run. Performance results are also very unpredictable. Steam game decryption has you in-game three minutes later than your friends with NVMe. Another important data point is ISO file copy, which simply copies a large file and has this SSD trail 20% behind the second-slowest drive. Surprisingly, even read-heavy scenarios are affected 'Text Search in Files' has the Samsung drive as the third-slowest. For example, in WinRAR extraction, which sends a huge amount of small writes to the SSD, the Samsung drive is the slowest by a huge margin. In relative terms the 870 QVO is still trailing the pack. Game startup times are barely affected in absolute terms, maybe a second slower, not worth worrying about.

On average it is the second-slowest SSD we ever tested, only the aging Crucial BX500 is slower. Our real-life test results paint a completely different picture of the SSD. If the review ended here, I'd definitely give the Samsung 870 QVO a recommendation, but well, it does not. Random and sequential reads are a little bit lower than some competing drives, but the differences are small. It achieves excellent results, especially when it comes to random and sequential writes. If we look at our synthetic testing, the Samsung 870 QVO does very well. This one's a modern LPDDR4 variant with 1 GB capacity. Last but not least, a DRAM cache chip is included to handle the mapping tables. Next to it sits a single lonely QLC flash chip, which is built using Samsung's new V-NAND v5 process, with an impressive density of 8 Tb per chip. At the center of the 870 QVO is the new MKX controller, a refined version of the MJX that powered the 860 QVO. Internally, Samsung is using only in-house components, which no doubt helps keep manufacturing cost down. It is one of the first consumer solid-state drives to offer capacities ranging up to 8 TB, which is important in achieving parity with mechanical HDDs. Samsung's 870 QVO SSD was released earlier this month.

Terrible steam controller software