Samsung 870 QVO 2TB SSD Review: The High-Capacity Upgrade Your PC Has Been Waiting For

I remember the moment I almost gave up on my old media server PC. It was a trusty machine, a digital attic filled with years of photos, music, and project files. But over time, it had developed a painful, sluggish groan. Every click was a negotiation. Booting up felt like watching a kettle boil in slow motion. The culprit, as is often the case, was its ageing mechanical hard drive. That familiar whirring and clicking, once a sound of productivity, had become the death rattle of performance. This frustration is a universal language spoken by anyone with an older laptop or desktop. You’re faced with a choice: spend a fortune on a new machine, or find a way to breathe new life into the one you have. For many, that’s where the search for a powerful, spacious, and affordable storage upgrade begins, leading them directly to solutions like the Samsung 870 QVO 2TB SSD.

What to Consider Before Buying a Solid State Drive

A Solid State Drive is more than just an item; it’s a key solution for instantly revitalising a computer’s performance. Unlike traditional Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) with their spinning platters and moving read/write heads, an SSD is built on flash memory, similar to a USB stick but vastly more powerful and durable. This fundamental difference eliminates mechanical bottlenecks, resulting in near-instant boot times, dramatically faster application loading, and a snappier, more responsive feel to your entire system. The primary benefit is speed, turning tedious waits into seamless action. Furthermore, with no moving parts, SSDs run silently, generate less heat, and are far more resistant to physical shock, making them an essential upgrade for both desktops and laptops.

The ideal customer for this type of product is someone facing the daily frustration of a slow computer, whether it’s an older laptop struggling with modern software, a desktop PC used for gaming that suffers from long loading screens, or a media centre that needs quick access to large files. It’s the perfect solution for budget-conscious tech enthusiasts, gamers, and everyday users who want a transformative upgrade without replacing their entire setup. However, it might not be the best fit for professionals who require the absolute peak of transfer speeds for tasks like 8K video editing or complex data modelling. Those users might consider higher-end NVMe M.2 drives, which connect directly to the motherboard’s PCIe lanes for even faster performance, albeit at a higher cost.

Before investing, consider these crucial points in detail:

• Dimensions & Space: The Samsung 870 QVO 2TB SSD uses the standard 2.5-inch form factor with a slim 7mm height. This makes it universally compatible with virtually all modern laptops that have a drive bay, as well as all desktop PCs, which typically have dedicated 2.5-inch mounting points. It’s crucial to ensure your device has a spare SATA port and a physical bay to house the drive.
• Capacity/Performance: Capacity is about how much data you can store, while performance is about how quickly you can access it. A 2TB capacity, as offered here, is a fantastic sweet spot for holding your operating system, numerous applications, and a large library of games or media. Performance is measured in sequential read/write speeds (MB/s) and random IOPS. The 870 QVO boasts speeds that effectively max out the SATA 6 Gb/s interface, making it as fast as this form factor allows.
• Materials & Durability: SSD durability is measured in Terabytes Written (TBW). This rating indicates how much data can be written to the drive over its lifetime. The 2TB model of the 870 QVO is rated for 720 TBW, which is more than enough for the vast majority of consumer use cases over many years. The drive is housed in a sleek, sturdy metal casing that helps dissipate heat and protect the internal components.
• Ease of Use & Maintenance: One of Samsung’s greatest strengths is its software ecosystem. The free Samsung Magician software allows you to monitor drive health, update firmware, and optimize performance with ease. For those upgrading an existing system, the Samsung Data Migration tool simplifies the process of cloning your old drive, making the transition nearly effortless even for less tech-savvy users.

Keeping these factors in mind, the Samsung 870 QVO 2TB SSD stands out in several areas, particularly its combination of massive capacity and excellent value. You can explore its detailed specifications here.

While the Samsung 870 QVO 2TB SSD is an excellent choice, it’s always wise to see how it stacks up against the competition. For a broader look at all the top models, we highly recommend checking out our complete, in-depth guide:

First Impressions and Key Features

Unboxing the Samsung 870 QVO 2TB SSD is a minimalist affair. The drive comes in a compact, smart-looking carton, securely nestled inside. Picking it up, the first thing you notice is its incredible lightness—at just 57 grams, it feels almost hollow compared to a clunky mechanical drive. The housing is a sleek, black metal chassis with clean Samsung branding, exuding a sense of quality and professionalism. It’s a standard 2.5-inch drive, meaning it slots perfectly into the drive caddies of desktops and the internal bays of laptops without any fuss. There are no extra accessories in the box, like screws or a SATA cable, which is standard practice but something first-time builders should note. This drive isn’t about flashy extras; it’s a purpose-built component designed for one thing: to deliver a huge amount of fast, reliable storage. Compared to its predecessors in the QVO line, the 870 brings refined controller technology and improved “Intelligent TurboWrite” to make its QLC NAND memory perform better than ever before.

Deep Dive: Putting the Samsung 870 QVO 2TB SSD to the Test

Beyond the specifications sheet lies the real-world performance, and this is where we spent the bulk of our time with the Samsung 870 QVO 2TB SSD. We installed it in two distinct systems: an ageing Dell laptop from 2017 to gauge its revitalisation potential, and a mid-range gaming desktop to test its mettle as a high-capacity game library drive. The goal was to understand not just the benchmark numbers, but the tangible impact it has on everyday use.

Unlocking Performance: The Real-World Speed Test

Samsung advertises sequential read speeds of up to 560 MB/s and write speeds of up to 530 MB/s. In our testing with CrystalDiskMark on a SATA III (6 Gb/s) connection, we consistently hit numbers that were right on the money, confirming that this drive fully saturates the SATA interface. This is a critical point: you’re getting the maximum possible speed from the 2.5-inch form factor. This translates into a phenomenally responsive system. The old Dell laptop, which previously took over a minute and a half to boot into a usable Windows desktop, was ready to go in under 20 seconds. Applications like Chrome and Photoshop, once sluggish to open, now snapped onto the screen instantly.

Many online discussions centre on the potential performance pitfalls of QLC (Quad-Level Cell) NAND, the technology that allows for such high capacities at a reasonable price. The concern is that sustained write speeds can plummet once the drive’s SLC cache is filled. To test this, we initiated a massive file transfer: copying a 150GB folder of 4K video files onto the drive. For the first 78GB—the size of the “Intelligent TurboWrite” cache—the drive blazed along at over 500 MB/s. After that, the speed did drop, settling at a sustained rate of around 160 MB/s. While this drop is noticeable, it’s crucial to contextualise it. This scenario only occurs during exceptionally large, continuous write operations. For everyday use—installing games, loading applications, editing documents, and even transferring smaller batches of files—you will almost always be operating within that lightning-fast cache. This confirms what many users have found: as a game drive or a primary OS drive, the performance is snappy and brilliant. One user noted it installs games from Steam as fast as their internet can download them, which is the perfect use case. It truly feels like a premium drive 99% of the time. This level of performance for the price is truly impressive.

The Capacity King: A Gamer’s and Media Lover’s Dream

The standout feature of the Samsung 870 QVO 2TB SSD is undoubtedly its vast capacity. In an era where AAA games can easily exceed 100GB each, a 500GB or even 1TB boot drive can feel cramped almost immediately. With 2 terabytes of space, that anxiety vanishes. We loaded our entire Steam, Epic Games, and GOG libraries onto the drive with room to spare. Games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Red Dead Redemption 2, notorious for their long loading screens on mechanical drives, saw load times slashed by 70-80%. Fast-travelling across vast open worlds became nearly instantaneous, a quality-of-life improvement that cannot be overstated for gamers.

This drive also excels as a media storage powerhouse. We mirrored the experience of one user who loaded their drive with 4K Blu-ray rips for use in a media player. The silence is golden. The absence of the constant seeking and spinning of an HDD in a quiet living room is a bigger deal than you might think. Accessing a huge movie library is instantaneous, with no stuttering or buffering, even with high-bitrate files. For content creators, photographers, and anyone who has been digitising years of media, this drive offers a silent, fast, and capacious archive. The QLC technology’s trade-off for slightly lower endurance is a non-issue here; with a 720 TBW rating, you would have to write over 100GB of data *every single day* for the entire 5-year warranty period to even approach its limit. For a storage drive, that’s a lifetime of use.

Installation and Software: A Seamless and Powerful Upgrade Path

Samsung has perfected the art of the user-friendly upgrade. Physically installing the Samsung 870 QVO 2TB SSD is as simple as it gets for a SATA drive. In our desktop, it was a matter of securing it in a drive bay and connecting the SATA power and data cables. In the laptop, it involved removing a few screws from the bottom panel and swapping it directly with the old HDD. As one user aptly put it, “bobs your uncle.” The entire physical process took less than 10 minutes in both cases.

Where Samsung truly pulls ahead of the competition is with its software suite. We downloaded the Samsung Magician software, which immediately recognized the drive. This powerful tool is more than just a gimmick. It provides a clean dashboard showing drive health, total bytes written, and temperature. It allows you to run performance benchmarks to confirm everything is working correctly and, crucially, it handles firmware updates with a single click, ensuring your drive always has the latest performance and stability improvements. We also tested the “Over Provisioning” feature, which reserves a portion of the drive’s capacity to assist the controller with wear-levelling and garbage collection, potentially improving long-term performance and endurance. For novice users, the Samsung Data Migration software is a godsend. It provides a step-by-step wizard to clone your existing operating system and all its files to the new SSD, making for a truly hassle-free transition. This attention to the user experience is what makes the process accessible even to those who aren’t tech-savvy, as several user reviews confirmed.

What Other Users Are Saying

Across the board, the feedback for the Samsung 870 QVO 2TB SSD is overwhelmingly positive, especially from users upgrading from traditional hard drives. One user with a three-year-old laptop described the difference as “like night and day,” a sentiment we wholeheartedly echo after our own tests. Another, a 72-year-old gamer on a budget, used the drive to revitalise his older AMD system, proving its value as a cost-effective upgrade path. Many praise its silent operation, with one user specifically installing it in a Freesat 4K box to eliminate the constant humming of the original mechanical drive.

However, the feedback isn’t without its critiques, which provide a balanced picture. A few power users have noted the write speed drop-off during very large file transfers, confirming our findings about the QLC cache limitations. One user, copying games from multiple HDDs simultaneously, found the drive was the bottleneck, writing at around 160 MB/s. This is a valid point for those who frequently move hundreds of gigabytes at a time. The most concerning piece of feedback came from a user whose drive reportedly failed completely after 18 months. While any electronic component can fail, and this appears to be a rare outlier, it’s a sobering reminder of the importance of regular backups for any critical data, regardless of the storage medium.

How Does the Samsung 870 QVO 2TB SSD Compare to Alternatives?

The Samsung 870 QVO 2TB SSD occupies a specific niche, but it’s important to understand the alternatives. Depending on your motherboard’s capabilities and your primary needs, another drive might be a better fit.

1. ORICO NVMe SSD 1TB M.2 with Heatsink

The ORICO J10 is an NVMe M.2 drive, which represents a different class of performance. Connecting via the PCIe Gen3 interface, it boasts read speeds up to 3100MB/s—more than five times faster than the 870 QVO. This makes it a superior choice for a primary operating system or boot drive in a modern PC or laptop that has an M.2 slot. If your priority is the absolute fastest boot times and application loading, and your motherboard supports it, an NVMe drive like this is the way to go. However, for sheer bulk storage at 2TB, the Samsung 870 QVO offers double the capacity for a comparable price, making it the better choice for a secondary games or media drive.

2. Samsung 980 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD

Sticking with the Samsung family, the 980 NVMe SSD is the next logical step up in performance. Like the ORICO, it’s an M.2 drive leveraging the PCIe 3.0 interface for speeds up to 3,500 MB/s. This drive is aimed squarely at enthusiasts, gamers, and content creators who demand high-speed performance from a top-tier brand. It’s an ideal primary drive to pair *with* a larger SATA drive like the 870 QVO. A common and highly effective setup is to use the super-fast 980 for your OS and most-used programs, and the capacious 870 QVO for your game library and file storage, giving you the best of both worlds.

3. Crucial MX500 4TB 2.5 Inch SSD

The Crucial MX500 is perhaps the most direct competitor to the Samsung 870 QVO 2TB SSD. It uses the same 2.5-inch SATA form factor and offers similar peak read/write speeds. The key difference lies in the underlying NAND technology; the MX500 typically uses TLC (Triple-Level Cell) NAND, which can offer better sustained write performance and higher endurance ratings compared to QLC. For users who frequently perform very large write operations and are willing to pay a slight premium for that sustained performance, the MX500 is a formidable alternative. However, for most mainstream users focused on gaming, general use, and media playback, the 870 QVO’s excellent burst performance and lower cost-per-gigabyte make it a more compelling value proposition.

Our Final Verdict: Is the Samsung 870 QVO 2TB SSD Right for You?

After extensive testing and analysis, our conclusion is clear: the Samsung 870 QVO 2TB SSD is a triumph of capacity and value. It may not win every raw speed benchmark against its pricier NVMe cousins, but it wasn’t designed to. Instead, it delivers on a far more practical promise: to provide a massive, silent, and incredibly responsive storage solution that can fundamentally transform the user experience of almost any SATA-based computer. It is the definitive upgrade for anyone looking to escape the sluggishness of a mechanical hard drive, build a colossal game library without breaking the bank, or create a silent and speedy media server.

We recommend it without hesitation to gamers, everyday desktop and laptop users, and anyone in need of cost-effective bulk solid-state storage. While power users with heavy, sustained write workloads might look towards a TLC-based drive like the Crucial MX500, the 870 QVO’s real-world performance is more than sufficient for over 95% of users. It stands as a testament to Samsung’s ability to make high-capacity SSD technology accessible to everyone.

If you’ve decided the Samsung 870 QVO 2TB SSD is the right fit, you can check its current price and purchase it here.