SAMSUNG 870 QVO SATA III SSD 4TB 2.5" Internal Solid State Drive, Upgrade Desktop PC or Laptop Memory and Storage for IT Pros, Creators, Everyday Users, MZ-77Q4T0B

Works really wellI have a 2018 Mac, 27" with 32gb memory and a 2 TB fusion drive and I try to keep about 350-400 GB free space, but sometimes it isn't easy!The reason why I got an SSD is that I use Parallels for Mac and have three Windows VM's and a few Linux and over time with the fusion drive, I was losing performance from time to time. Seems that I have no issues or complaints until I install an update from Apple or an update from Parallels then it slows down again and I have to go and optimize and then it runs pretty fast for 3-4 days until another update! The intent of the SSD was to remove the fusion issues and just go solid SSD. If I bought a 2 TB drive, it would solve ONE problem but would not solve the needed space to give me more flexibility. I chose the 4 TB, even though it wasn't in my budget, to solve both problems at once and I am glad that I did and would recommend anyone to invest the money and move up to the extra space.This is really interesting for those who have a Mac but don't want to open up the computer to replace the drive.I bought a USB-C enclosure and made sure the cable has USB-C on both ends. USB will work fine, but why not go with USB-C and get better performance? I placed the SSD in the enclosure and after booting up the Mac and logging in, plugged the enclosure with the 4 TB SSD into a USB-C port. I formatted it (don't format as encrypted).I have been using Acronis True Image for a couple years now, so I didn't have to buy any software. I opened the app and chose to "Clone" and ensure that I chose the correct drives! Triple check so you don't lose your host drive. I started the process at 1:45 p.m. and by 7:30 p..m. same day cloning 1.6 TB of data, it was done.Next, I went to the disk utility to rename the cloned drive! Obviously since it is a clone, it will clone the name as well!!!! I put SSD as part of the name so I would be able to verify that I am actually booting from it. I was able to reboot and holding down the option key able to boot into my SSD.Important step - go to the "About This Mac" and verify the startup disk is the cloned one!Now that I had a faster system, I chose to do some more updates on the OS and clean up my Windows 10 VM's. At first, everything seemed a little slow. That was expected as your Mac is optimizing things, as well as the Windows VM.When we buy a drive with more space than we may feel we need, something good happens... we alleviate risks and remove bad habits! With Parallels for Mac, it is essential that you take snapshots and create backups. Parallels will do this automatically, but you do need to ensure that you have the room. I was able to go to the settings and now, I will be able to access a backup up to two months old, a week old, and every other day. I feel better! Of course, backup to external drive but I feel better one of the most important part of my system is now being backed up automatically.The first few hours, I noticed a little bit of speed but not much but I knew why. Before I did the SSD upgrade, I never gave a lot of the VM's room to breathe or do the necessary updates and I had a lot of bottlenecks. I would use one VM for awhile but not another so I feel that Fusion was trying to optimize my experience but because of the size of the VM's (400gb +), it just wasn't getting it.After about 8 hours of updating, uninstalling apps I don't need in each of the Windows VM and just working through it, I am finally able to see some very fast appreciable and consistent speeds on both the Mac and the VM's. Could I have optimized my Mac and Windows experience beforehand and would that have helped with performance? Yes, I do admit that I could've done that and seen some improvements. In fact, my original fusion drive is still inside the Mac, so I could go back to the fusion drive and do all the optimizations!I always trust Samsung for SSD and have used them in servers before without having any issues. I am more than pleased with the performance and performing my work is so much faster now.I may choose to have the drive installed as an internal drive. I am grateful that I am able to boot to the SSD as an external drive and still see a major performance boost. It's well worth it!Overall, very pleased. The 4 TB was a bit out of my price range, but I made it happen and thankful that I did. I would love (as anyone else would be) for SSD 4TB and 8TB prices to come down 50% below what they are now. I have 24 TB of data that I would really love to convert to SSD but not at $800-$1,000 for the 8TB one. Come on Samsung! Let's do it and save the environment!

Ps 4's hd broke down and this was very easy to install and format to get back in the game. Made a huge difference from some old sluggish had that was breaking down .

Been working like a charm.

Good product!

For the capacity it's a great priced drive. I've been slowly switching my NAS over to these the past few years, so I've got probably 3 years on the oldest one. Like you'd expect from a solid state drive, they're quiet and work where a 2.5" drive would fit. I don't push the speed enough to speak to that, but I'm happy with them.

Before I begin, if you're looking at getting a 4tb 2.5 inch ssd, just go with the Crucial MX500. It's consistently the best one for the money. I bought this one since it was $350 when the 4tb MX500 was $360. I regret not spending the extra $10. I'll elaborate further in the review, but to summarize, the MX500 uses TLC nand, where as the 870 QVO uses QLC nand, so write speeds in particular are much faster over sustained periods of time on the MX500 4tb than the 870 QVO.Now, to my actual review. 2.5 inch hard drives seem to cap around 2tb, so if you want something of this capacity within that form factor, you have to resort to these 4tb+ consumer drives. This one is generally the cheapest within this category, hence why I chose it. Here's what you need to know about this drive:Pros:1.) This drive comes in a premium box, is well secured in it's place, is built in a nice metal case with a fine, black wrinkle finish. Every part of the experience of building your pc with this drive is great.2.) $/GB is great. Lots of storage for your money. You can thank QLC nand for that.3.) It's snappy enough to not feel like a bottleneck for most regular workloads. You can 4k video edit off of it, you can download games at the peak of most internet connections, and you can transfer normal sized files, like 20gb or smaller, in 35-40 seconds or less. Not even enough time to get up to pee.4.) There's an SLC cache of around 70-75gb that keeps the ssd feeling very snappy for workloads within that 0-70gb size. You get the usual speed of 550mbps reads and 300-500mbps writes depending on file size within this workload. This is necessary for QLC drives to feel snappy, as QLC nand flash is far slower than TLC, MLC, or SLC nand flash, so this large SLC cache is awesome to have. This also brings me to what I dislike about this driveCons:1.) It's a QLC drive. These are the slowest SSDs available on the market. Thankfully, this one isn't slow for most use cases, but once that aforementioned 70gb SLC cache fills up, the drive gets slow. REALLY slow. You write at the speed of hard drives, or even slower. 60MBps-100MBps is what I see during these workloads.2.) Although it's cheap for a 4tb ssd, for an extra $10 on the regular, you can get the Crucial MX500. That's a TLC drive that mops the floor with this drive for write intensive workloads. For most people, they wouldn't notice the difference, but for me, the extra speed after that 70-75gb mark means the difference between getting to download a large game like COD Warzone in one night and game with my friends vs waiting for the next day to game with them.3.) At this price point, you have the option of NVME drives. If you need speed, go with those. 2tb gen 4 ssds are commonly available at this price, and although it's half the capacity, they're more than 10 times as fast for sequential workloads. I'd recommend the XPG Gammix s70 blade, since it's $230 at the time of writing this, and competes with drives that cost $300-$350.

Excellent

I considered an external NAS or an a large SSD. In the end chose the large SSD because of the general simplicity of the entire setup. That means, pound for pound, in terms of storage, I'm getting a significant amount of storage for relatively low cost.SSDs are incredibly fast and this one is no different. It works perfectly for it's intended purpose, and I dont think lifespan is going to be an issue. The data going on this device is one and done. There will be few if any, writes or rewrites. Which leaves one serious concern and that is data integrity, but there is software that can help ensure that.Likewise heat isn't an issue. The computer this is in isn't a power house but it the SSD is far away from the primary heat source, the GPU and CPU.As for value, if you're buying an 8TB SSD and it's a Samsung money isn't an issue for you to begin with, so this isn't going to really factor in. The question is is this route over a NAS worth it compared to the price of the SSD and only time will tell.