Samsung 870 Evo

It won’t set pulses racing, but the 870 Evo gives an old PC a new lease of life with no grumbling

SCORE

PRICE 500GB, £48 (£58 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324sam3

READ SPEED 528MB/ SEC

WRITE SPEED 499MB/ SEC

It’s difficult for a SATA drive to set itself apart from the crowd because both performance and physical design are constrained by the SATA standard. Frankly, the Samsung 870 Evo doesn’t really manage to express a character of its own – but equally, it doesn’t get anything wrong.

Let’s start with performance: the 870 Evo’s SDRAM cache ensured that it didn’t falter in any of AS SSD’s sequential and random-access tests, consistently matching up to the best of its rivals. And in the PCMark 10 storage benchmarks it placed ahead of both Adata and Kingston’s SATA offerings, if a little behind its QVO stablemate ( see opposite).

The 870 Evo is good value too. The 500GB model we tested works out to 12p per gigabyte, while the 1TB model can be had for just £97, which is equivalent to 10p/GB. Samsung also offers it in 2TB and 4TB capacities, although these are niche options and are priced to match at £239 and £384 respectively.

While there’s not much in the way of bells and whistles, the 870 Evo does support 256-bit AES hardware encryption. It can be managed through the shiny Samsung Magician toolkit, and you can also download the free Data Migration software to clone the contents of your old drive onto your new one – although you will need to find a way to get both disks connected at once.

With a five-year warranty and a promised write endurance of 600TBW, the Samsung 870 Evo ticks all of the important boxes. If you’re upgrading an old PC or laptop then it will do the job with no ifs or buts.