Samsung 870 EVO 500GB 2.5″ SSD Review

How Much Does it Cost?

Now is a great time for buying a new SSD, at just £65 the latest drive from Samsung is excellent value for money. However, while you can get the Samsung 870 EVO for just £65 for the 500GB version, the 250GB version is £48, the 1TB is £118 and the 2TB is £205. However, there’s a 4TB model, but I couldn’t see accurate pricing information for this. However, £400-500 would be a safe bet. Find stock and prices on Amazon here.

Most most modern gaming builds, however, I think the 500GB or the 1TB model will be the most popular. 240 GB just doesn’t sound like enough these days, but I’m sure there’s a market for it for non-gaming systems.

Overview

Samsung is one of the biggest and best-respected names in the world. They’ve got a strong history of high-performance products, and while the 870 EVO isn’t setting new world records, it certainly upholds the Samsung reputation. It’s not hard to find an SSD that maxes out what SATA has to offer. Thankfully, I’m happy to report that this is one of them, and I saw no issues in any of my testing.

Performance

A lot of the benefits for this drive come from the addition of Samsung’s Intelligent Turbo Write. It’s a simple built-in tool that can accelerate the drives write speeds and protect the drive’s long-term performance. It’s effectively a buffer and will help you maintain the maximum throughput of the drive. That being said, I didn’t see any issues with the drive being throttled or bottlenecked.

Even when the drive was filled, read and write speeds were consistently maintained. Scores actually increased by a small margin in AS SSD, albeit within a margin for error. Overall though, the drive performed exactly as expected, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that!

Build Quality

The Samsung 870 EVO comes with a gorgeous aluminium top cover design, making the drive feel like a quality product that should survive a few knocks and bumps. Samsung rate it at 1,500G, duration: 0.5ms, 3 axis shock reliability and 20~2,000Hz, 20G vibration resistance. Of course, the aluminium top also acts as its own heatsink to ensure optimal performance.

It features the Samsung MKX Controller, and Samsung V-NAND 3bit MLC across all capacities, so performance should be consistent. The 250GB and 500GB models rely on 512MB LPDDR4 DRAM Cache, increasing for higher capacity models. Samsung rates the drive with 1.5 million hours MTBF and gives the drive a 5-year limited warranty.

Should I Buy One?

There’s no shortage of competitive SSDs on the market today. However, with a reputation as strong as Samsung’s, as well as knowing they use their own high-quality V-NAND, with excellent build quality and a great warranty, it’s hard not to be impressed with the price of the Samsung 870 EVO 500GB!