I’ve been running four Samsung 870 QVO 4TB SATA SSD-s for a while now. They’re old enough to be popping up on the second-hand market, so I thought it would be good to provide a few additional data points for those thinking about buying one.

Mine have mainly been used in a home server setting, with one also being used as a backup drive at times. I initially got these drives because I found the noise that hard drives generated to be unacceptably high in a small apartment. They’re also quite a bit faster than hard drives and use significantly less power.

The drives were manufactured in 2021, two in April, two in June.

Overall, I haven’t seen many issues with the drives, and when I did, it was a Linux kernel issue. These drives are still performing at the expected speed and at during write-heavy workloads they only drop down to 140-170 MB/s, which is considerably better than what the cheapest SATA SSD-s can do in the same scenario, those can go a low as 30 MB/s or even worse.

I did notice that one of the drives reported 4 bad blocks over its lifetime, and oddly enough it’s the drive with the least amount of power-on hours.

The reported SSD lifetime is reported to be around 94%, with over 170+ TB of data written. At this point, the drives are not even close to the 1440 TBW endurance limit that Samsung has published.

The price hasn’t gone down as much as I’ve hoped over the years. At the time I bought the drives, they were roughly 400 EUR a piece, and now they’re selling for about 270 EUR a piece. It’s still significantly cheaper, but back in 2021-2022 there was more optimism about SSD prices coming down over the years. For comparison, 4TB SSD-s from other manufacturers and form factors (NVMe, SATA) start from about 190-200 EUR, however I am not fully confident that those perform at the same level, at least under sustained writes.

For those curious, here’s the full smartctl -ax output for all the individual drives.