Questions about Samsung QVO SSD

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  1. Posts : 1,310
    Windows 10
       #1

    Questions about Samsung QVO SSD


    So I managed to acquire a Samsung QVO and there after I realize few concerns that I can't figure an answer for which , here they are :

    1 - The internet claims in harsh words that the QVO line of hard drives has a lifespan of 3 years or a warranty of 3 years whichever comes first , now the question is : What happens exactly when the lifespan of the drive is over ? how do these breeds end ? just try to put it on one day and they wont work ? do I have to keep a record of purchase date and try to replace it before 3 years ? also I plan to have it on constantly , shouldn't that reduce the lifespan ?

    2 - There are contradicting info on the internet that the drive comes with onboard DRAM and that is something that would boost file retrieval time by hosting hard drive file system on a dedicated chip (a.k.a Rapid Mode) and is a feature that does not come on by default but has to be switched on by Samsung Magician , on different sites it is claimed that those drives do not come with DRAM on board but rather deduct certain GBs from system RAM to carry on this feature , now the question is : Which is the truth , also if it is claimed that the DRAM is supposed to carry the file allocation table , wouldn't leaving it on system RAM render it unsecure since this thing can be lost to a hard restart ?

    3 - There is an extra feature on Samsung Magician that claims that if I put it on , it will deduct 10% of the drive's space but offer longer lifespan and more speed , now the question is : The drive is already partitioned , what exactly will happen if I enable this feature , will they start deducting space by ratio from all partitions ? what if I turned it off again , will that space be restored ?

    4 - I am not very keen to run services other than system defaults , Samsung Magician manages to install a constantly running service , the question is : If I turn its service off , would it shut off all the upper mentioned functions (Rapid , 10%) or those are on / off checks unrelated to the service that runs anyways for that all manufacturers do these sort of blahs out of Telemetry they tend to love lately ?
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  2. Posts : 2,800
    Windows 7 Pro
       #2

    Hi,

    1: Most decent SSDs will finish gracefully their live by becoming non-writable. They can be always on without problems. And their lifespan is related to the uses and how filled they are getting. Larger drives have more write endurance, I try never to fill them over 60% on the Operating System drive. If you are a heavy weight user and worry about it's longevity you may consider the SSD PRO series or get the largest drive possible.

    2: Yes SSDs with on board Ram will feel significantly faster but it doesn't mean a Ram less disk will be slow. Samsung’s DRAM-less drives offer similar performance, with sequential read and write speeds. The ram is used for read acceleration and write optimization.

    3: Samsung Magician will allocate up to 10% of your disk into free space without losing any data and use it as over provisioning source. OP region assists in efficient delivery of free blocks when wear-leveling or garbage collection is in progress and contributes to improved performance and lifetime of the SSD helping maintain high Random writes output. .

    4:Once setup you don't need to run magician, and many peoples don't use Rapid mode. Installing Magician SSD toolbox, requires users to agree to Samsung collection of personal data EULA. If you don't, they can't upgrade their firmware.
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  3. Posts : 4,568
    several
       #3
    Last edited by SIW2; 15 Nov 2021 at 08:38.
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  4. Posts : 1,310
    Windows 10
    Thread Starter
       #4

    MaloK said:
    Hi,

    1: Most decent SSDs will finish gracefully their live by becoming non-writable. They can be always on without problems. And their lifespan is related to the uses and how filled they are getting. Larger drives have more write endurance, I try never to fill them over 60% on the Operating System drive. If you are a heavy weight user and worry about it's longevity you may consider the SSD PRO series or get the largest drive possible.

    2: Yes SSDs with on board Ram will feel significantly faster but it doesn't mean a Ram less disk will be slow. Samsung’s DRAM-less drives offer similar performance, with sequential read and write speeds. The ram is used for read acceleration and write optimization.

    3: Samsung Magician will allocate up to 10% of your disk into free space without losing any data and use it as over provisioning source. OP region assists in efficient delivery of free blocks when wear-leveling or garbage collection is in progress and contributes to improved performance and lifetime of the SSD helping maintain high Random writes output. .

    4:Once setup you don't need to run magician, and many peoples don't use Rapid mode. Installing Magician SSD toolbox, requires users to agree to Samsung collection of personal data EULA. If you don't, they can't upgrade their firmware.
    1 - If that is an abstract from Samsung or whatever other site can I see a link claiming that so I feel relieved ?

    2 - I was wondering if QVO has on board DRAM or not , this doesn't answer it .

    3 - I finally decided to try it , turns out if you have all spaces allocated to partitions it will deduct virtually 10% from total disk and prohibit writing to which without showing in partitions or drive properties .

    4 - Turns out yes I do not need Samsung Magician as it turns out that it installs separate service named Samsung Rapid SVC where that one needs to be always on .

    - - - Updated - - -

    Thanks , it is very informative , yet very obsolete , it talks nothing of QVO but an upcoming technology they await to test with and see , but numbers shows it to be a really high risk .
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  5. Posts : 2,800
    Windows 7 Pro
       #5

    Hi nIGHTmAYOR,

    1: it's from my experience with multiple brands, they just stop writing.

    2: the QVO is the entry level drive and has no ram.

    3: you're right

    4: Rapid is not necessary. But I like the way it helps maintain health of the drive and give a little more speed too.
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  6. Posts : 31,623
    10 Home x64 (22H2) (10 Pro on 2nd pc)
       #6

    nIGHTmAYOR said:
    So I managed to acquire a Samsung QVO and there after I realize few concerns that I can't figure an answer for which , here they are :

    1 - The internet claims in harsh words that the QVO line of hard drives has a lifespan of 3 years or a warranty of 3 years whichever comes first , now the question is : What happens exactly when the lifespan of the drive is over ? how do these breeds end ? just try to put it on one day and they wont work ? do I have to keep a record of purchase date and try to replace it before 3 years ? also I plan to have it on constantly , shouldn't that reduce the lifespan ?

    The lifespan of an SSD is specified by the manufacturer a the total number or Terabytes that can be written to the drive before the NAND cells that store the date will start to wear out. Data can actually be stored as several bits in each NAND cell, each represented by a different charge level in the cell. The more bits stored per cell, the cheaper it can be to provide high capacity. However it also means the less wear can be tolerated before a multi-level cell cannot be read reliably. Typically most consumer SSDs (such as the Samsung EVO range) use 3 bit per cell (3 bit MLC). The QVO range uses 4 bit MLC.

    For a 500GB 3-bit MLC SSD such as the 860 EVO the manufacturer's spec for TeraBytes Written is typically 300TBW, for a 4 bit MLC SSD the TBW is typically half that of the equivalent sized 3 bit MLC SSD.

    Bree said:
    ...the 860 QVO only has a three year warranty vs. five years for the 860 EVO? For the same size drive the Total Byte Written is lower too, 360TB for a 1TB QVO 860 vs. 600TB for a 1TB 860 EVO. Actually, for longevity the older 1TB 860 PRO beats them both with 1,200TB.

    The key difference is that the 860 QVO uses
    4-bit MLC, the 860 EVO uses 3-bit MLC and the 860 PRO has 2-bit MLC.
    Upgraded from 500GB SSD to 1TB SSD

    2 - There are contradicting info on the internet that the drive comes with onboard DRAM and that is something that would boost file retrieval time by hosting hard drive file system on a dedicated chip (a.k.a Rapid Mode) and is a feature that does not come on by default but has to be switched on by Samsung Magician , on different sites it is claimed that those drives do not come with DRAM on board but rather deduct certain GBs from system RAM to carry on this feature , now the question is : Which is the truth , also if it is claimed that the DRAM is supposed to carry the file allocation table , wouldn't leaving it on system RAM render it unsecure since this thing can be lost to a hard restart ?

    The drive does have its own onboard RAM and its firmware will use it to reduce wear. Samsung Magician's RAPID optimisation feature requires the OS to have a Samsung driver loaded so that it can use the PC's own DRAM to further enhance speed by caching files to RAM in addition to any native capability of the drive.

    There is a catch, however, and that is that there will always be a risk of data loss when caching files in the RAM....
    Samsung Magician 4.5 RAPID Mode - Evaluated With Demonstrated Speed Increase | The SSD Review

    3 - There is an extra feature on Samsung Magician that claims that if I put it on , it will deduct 10% of the drive's space but offer longer lifespan and more speed , now the question is : The drive is already partitioned , what exactly will happen if I enable this feature , will they start deducting space by ratio from all partitions ? what if I turned it off again , will that space be restored ?

    Data storage in an SSD is not like that of an HDD. When you write to an HDD the data is stored sequentially on the tracks. In an SSD the data could be mapped to any available cell. The SSD's firmware makes this look like sequential data to the OS, but in reality it could be spread out across the whole SSD.

    Over provisioning means leaving part of the drive as unallocated space, typically about 10%. The purpose of this is to give the drive's onboard firmware plenty of options as to which cell to write to when saving data, allowing it to spread the wear evenly across all cells. If you turn on over provisioning in Samsung Magician it will shrink the last partition of the drive to create this unallocated space.

    However, for wear levelling to be efficient it doesn't need the free space to be specifically set aside as 'unallocated'. Wear levelling is just as happy to use free space in any of your partitions, so unless you intend to use more than 90% in each partition then over provisioning isn't really of any benefit.

    For wear levelling to work at its best you need to TRIM the SSD regularly. But you don't need Magician to do that for you, Windows own Optimise Drives services will do that for you once a month by default.

    4 - I am not very keen to run services other than system defaults , Samsung Magician manages to install a constantly running service , the question is : If I turn its service off , would it shut off all the upper mentioned functions (Rapid , 10%) or those are on / off checks unrelated to the service that runs anyways for that all manufacturers do these sort of blahs out of Telemetry they tend to love lately ?

    Samsung RAPID, as I said above, requires Samsung services to be running. Over provisioning is just partition management and does not require any services to be running.

    After you close Magician it 's still running and has an icon in the Taskbar notification area (look in Hidden icons). You can right-click on this and select Exit to completely turn off Magician. If you have enabled RAPID it will warn you that in doing so you will turn off RAPID optimisations.
    Last edited by Bree; 15 Nov 2021 at 17:46.
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  7. Posts : 4,568
    several
       #7

    2 - I was wondering if QVO has on board DRAM or not
    Yes it does.

    870 QVO | Consumer SSD | Samsung Semiconductor


    Questions about Samsung QVO SSD-qvo-specs..jpg

    On the question of over provisioning:

    If you run the samsung magician software it is wise follow what it recommends regarding over provisioning.


    QLC vs TLC SSDs: Samsung QVO & EVO


    QLC vs TLC SSDs: Samsung QVO & EVO - YouTube
    Last edited by SIW2; 16 Nov 2021 at 10:17.
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  8. Posts : 231
    W10
       #8

    Your drive will most likely provide many times more endurance than what the manufacture rates it at. You will probably replace the computer before you wear out the SSD.
    Read this article:
    The SSD Endurance Experiment: They're all dead - The Tech Report
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  9. Posts : 2,800
    Windows 7 Pro
       #9

    This is a theoretically 150TB write endurance drive after 5 years. the drives still shows 13% life remains.
    Attached Thumbnails Attached Thumbnails Questions about Samsung QVO SSD-samsungdrivehealth.png  
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  10. Posts : 31,623
    10 Home x64 (22H2) (10 Pro on 2nd pc)
       #10

    This video looks at endurance and over provisioning.

    SSD Life Expectancy - YouTube
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