The Samsung 750 EVO (120GB & 250GB) SSD Review: A Return To Planar NAND
by Billy Tallis on April 22, 2016 8:00 AM ESTFinal Words
The Samsung 750 EVO is a drive for a limited audience. It is intended for use as the primary boot drive of a system that will not be subjected to particularly intense storage workloads, and the limited capacity options preclude using it to hold a large game or multimedia library. Seen through this lens, the 750 EVO offers great performance for a budget drive. The peak performance of the 750 EVO is close to the Samsung 850 EVO and even the 850 Pro in many cases. On tests simulating lighter real-world usage the 750 EVO is generally the fastest budget TLC drive and also sometimes competes well against low-end MLC drives.
That said, if the 750 EVO is subjected to a more strenuous workload, things start to fall apart. The performance of this drive suffers greatly if it is operated in a near-full state and when sustained writes overflow its SLC cache. The same is also true of any other budget TLC drive, but most of the competition handles the pressure better than the 750 EVO. The best way to make use of the 750 EVO is probably to pair it with a large hard drive to hold bulk data and large applications. This is especially true of the 120GB model, as that much space can quickly fill up if used to store even a few movies or games.
As a cost-cutting exercise, the 750 EVO produces interesting results. Samsung's in-house SSD controller design was already the cheapest option for Samsung to use, and they didn't produce a crippled cut-down version for the 750 EVO. Instead, the 750 EVO gets the same higher-performance controller from the lower capacity 850 EVO, and broad feature set of the full 850 series. The NAND flash is where almost all of the cost savings occur and that does have an impact on performance, but under reasonable usage scenarios the Samsung controller is able to compensate for that better than most others. The warranty and endurance ratings on the 750 EVO are lower than for the 850 EVO but are normal for the budget segment of the market.
| SSD Price Comparison | ||
| Drive | 240GB/250GB | 120GB |
| ADATA SP550 | $57.99 | $34.99 |
| PNY CS1311 | $59.99 | $39.99 |
| PNY CS2211 | $79.99 | |
| OCZ Trion 150 | $59.99 | $45.99 |
| SanDisk Ultra II | $74.99 | $54.79 |
| Samsung 750 EVO | $79.95 | $59.99 |
| Samsung 850 EVO | $87.89 | $68.95 |
The current pricing for the Samsung 750 EVO accurately reflects where it ranks in terms of performance and features. For consumers who would otherwise consider getting a small 850 EVO, the 750 EVO saves some money while making only modest sacrifices in performance.
At the same time however due to this higher performance, Samsung is charging a higher price for it, and consequently compared to budget drives from other companies the Samsung 750 EVO doesn't look very attractive from a total price or price-per-gigabyte basis. There are MLC drives like the PNY CS2211 at the same price as the 250GB 750 EVO. There are 240GB TLC drives at or below the price of the 120GB 750 EVO, and the $25 gap between the 120GB ADATA SP550 and the 120GB Samsung 750 EVO is huge. In the end I suspect that most users who don't have a hard requirement for drive encryption would be better served by either a slightly lower performing drive with much better price per GB, or a higher-performing option than the 750 EVO.
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DanNeely - Friday, April 22, 2016 - link
The cheap SSD will still blow the spinning rust in the other crappy TN 720p laptop out of the water.jabber - Friday, April 22, 2016 - link
Yeah amazing how limited people's imaginations are when it comes to hardware and other peoples usage needs. Unless it's pushing 2GBps it's junk. Tedious people. If every laptop in the world with a cheap 5400rpm HDD in it swapped to one of these 'bottom of the barrel' Samsung SSDs, it would be a revelation. Make my job of support a lot easier and faster.Movieman420 - Friday, April 22, 2016 - link
Keep in mind, launch prices are always a bit high. Sammy could sell em for less at retail...but they're really not after retail with the 750...they wanna move em in bulk minus retail packaging costs. As far as performace, they're just right...for the intended market. As a budget OEM part, the vast majority of end users (80% maybe?) will fall in Anands light bench metric where this drive makes a pretty good showing. Any better would risk cannibalizing EVO sales. Overall, this product and placement was well thought out by Samsung...as usual....and from a performance standpoint a lil over-provisioning goes a long way. I'm assuming it's not compatible with magician's RAPID mode...unless say your a huge oem customer who'd pay a tad extra and make it a performance offering in more expensive lappys with enuff ram.
iwod - Friday, April 22, 2016 - link
What we need to know is final street price, not launch price.Because as it stand i have Zero reason to buy them. It needs at least a 50% price cost.versesuvius - Saturday, April 23, 2016 - link
As long as Samsung is clearing unused chips from its stock, it could just offer these drives for $25 each to make a gesture of good will towards its existing customers and make some new ones too.The_Assimilator - Saturday, April 23, 2016 - link
Good to see you're "revieiwng" this drive. Could you maybe consider reviewing a spellchecker and/or editor in future?zodiacfml - Saturday, April 23, 2016 - link
Cheapest option but purchased separately, $10 difference is not worth it.The perrformance of the 850 is useful for most people savvy enough to replace drtives.
serendip - Saturday, April 23, 2016 - link
$10 may be a big BOM savings for large system builders but it's pocket change for consumers looking to upgrade from a hard drive. This drive probably isn't aimed at you :)I wouldn't trade $10 for half the write longevity and potentially other issues from using planar TLC. The 850 Evo is still the king and the Sandisk Ultra II is also a good deal when it goes on sale.
Peroxyde - Sunday, April 24, 2016 - link
How is the Corsair LE compared to 850 EVO, 750 EVO? In terms of reliability?odedia - Sunday, April 24, 2016 - link
According to Amazon.com, this drive is currently more expensive then the 250gb 850 Evo. Makes zero sense to buy this today. maybe in a year it will be priced accordingly.