We are currently testing a large number of second-generation PCIe 4.0 SSDs and will post them on our site shortly. In the meantime, Samsung believes that the old SATA standard still has some life left in it, and today they announced the Samsung 870 EVO. This new SATA SSD boasts up to 30% more performance than the 860 EVO, not a shabby boost by any means.

The Samsung 870 EVO is the latest SSD to be manufactured entirely in-house, using the company's latest V-NAND flash memory and controller. The drive uses a variable SLC buffer with Samsung's Intelligent TurboWrite technology to maintain peak performance. Overall, read speeds of 560 MB/s and write speeds of 530 MB/s are at the limits of the 6 Gbps SATA interface. Incidentally, the random read and write IOPS are 98K and 88K. [While we're hitting 7,000MB/sec in M.2 land, these new drives aren't even reaching a tenth of that. So why is Samsung releasing SATA drives in 2021? Many users, including gamers, may not have access to the latest NVMe standard or may only have one or two slots to which they can connect. On the other hand, even the most modest motherboards have at least four SATA ports. Additionally, there are older laptops and NAS drives. Basically, there is a healthy market.

Beyond raw throughput, what does the Samsung 870 EVO bring to the party? One obvious thing is the fact that the new SSDs are available in capacities up to 4TB. Whether the Samsung 870 EVO will make an impact on the market will definitely depend on the price; SATA SSDs are not considered the premium storage mass they once were, so you can't charge big bucks for them. We've been recommending the Crucial MX500 in our best gaming SSD guide for a while now, simply because of its pricing. The Samsung 870 EVO may be slightly faster, but is it worth its price? We won't know until we test it, but we doubt it is.