- Feb 25, 2011
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Bought to use as Steam drive. Z77/3570k rig in signature. $228 on Amazon last weekend. The Mushkin Reactor 1TB that was my only Windows drive was getting... cramped.
Nothing really interesting here. I didn't get as good a performance level as the Anandtech review last fall, but I never do (probably a variety of reasons.)
Obligatory Box Shots:
No accessories, not even a sticker, just the manual/warranty booklet and a little color brochure telling me to download Samsung's utility software. Which I did not.
Obligatory AS-SSD on empty new drive:
https://i.imgur.com/Uprn8AV.png
Obligatory AS-SSD on half-full system drive (Mushkin Reactor 1TB, MLC) for comparison:
https://i.imgur.com/5pqquo2.png
Supposedly, the thing QLC is worst at is the long sustained writes. That's why they use SLC caching and DRAM and whatnot. Fine for light workloads, but anything heavy and long-term will kill it. Let's test this.
Steam allows you to move games over, but only one at a time:
https://i.imgur.com/JnBB3u0.png
Still, GTA V, at 85GB, is big enough to confirm the effect.
I disabled live/on-access AV scanning so it wouldn't effect things:
https://i.imgur.com/z7bBDVl.png
Beginning of Copy:
https://i.imgur.com/xtMy0V3.png (See: ~380MB/sec writing to disk)
End of Copy:
https://i.imgur.com/3hssDWd.png (See: ~160MB/sec writing to disk)
Strange that it seems to trade off file-reading duties between the System and Steam.exe. I copied it back and forth a couple times, watching Resource Monitor each time - it looked like it was starting to slow down around 40GB, and the split between Steam.exe and System went back and forth a few times each run. My assumption is that Steam is doing some file validation or something, but my CPU use stayed below 50% so I don't think it was bottlenecking anything. Nice to see the same 160MB/sec sustained QLC write that Samsung claims.
Total time to move GTAV from old to new drive was 6:25. Copying the same data (GTAV) in the reverse direction took 3:43, or ~383MB/sec on average. So the 860 QVO is able to read at least as fast as the Reactor can do a sustained write, pretty much.
Despite the sustained write performance problem, given the advantages in the 4k-64 and latency tests, I'd be tempted to say the 860 QVO is a better all-around drive.
Nothing really interesting here. I didn't get as good a performance level as the Anandtech review last fall, but I never do (probably a variety of reasons.)
Obligatory Box Shots:
No accessories, not even a sticker, just the manual/warranty booklet and a little color brochure telling me to download Samsung's utility software. Which I did not.
Obligatory AS-SSD on empty new drive:
https://i.imgur.com/Uprn8AV.png
Obligatory AS-SSD on half-full system drive (Mushkin Reactor 1TB, MLC) for comparison:
https://i.imgur.com/5pqquo2.png
Supposedly, the thing QLC is worst at is the long sustained writes. That's why they use SLC caching and DRAM and whatnot. Fine for light workloads, but anything heavy and long-term will kill it. Let's test this.
Steam allows you to move games over, but only one at a time:
https://i.imgur.com/JnBB3u0.png
Still, GTA V, at 85GB, is big enough to confirm the effect.
I disabled live/on-access AV scanning so it wouldn't effect things:
https://i.imgur.com/z7bBDVl.png
Beginning of Copy:
https://i.imgur.com/xtMy0V3.png (See: ~380MB/sec writing to disk)
End of Copy:
https://i.imgur.com/3hssDWd.png (See: ~160MB/sec writing to disk)
Strange that it seems to trade off file-reading duties between the System and Steam.exe. I copied it back and forth a couple times, watching Resource Monitor each time - it looked like it was starting to slow down around 40GB, and the split between Steam.exe and System went back and forth a few times each run. My assumption is that Steam is doing some file validation or something, but my CPU use stayed below 50% so I don't think it was bottlenecking anything. Nice to see the same 160MB/sec sustained QLC write that Samsung claims.
Total time to move GTAV from old to new drive was 6:25. Copying the same data (GTAV) in the reverse direction took 3:43, or ~383MB/sec on average. So the 860 QVO is able to read at least as fast as the Reactor can do a sustained write, pretty much.
Despite the sustained write performance problem, given the advantages in the 4k-64 and latency tests, I'd be tempted to say the 860 QVO is a better all-around drive.
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