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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
109 Comments
View All Comments
BurntMyBacon - Monday, April 25, 2016 - link
@vladx: "Don't know what you mean, I also have a 840 EVO and can confirm the performances issues are gone after the 2nd fix."The fix forces a periodic rewrite of data that shouldn't have been necessary. Also, the fix doesn't work for machines that are powered down for large periods at a time as it requires power to monitor and execute the rewrites. This fix isn't optimal as it lowers the effective endurance of the drive. Combine that with the fact that the drive uses TLC flash with a write endurance of 1000x and you have a situation that enthusiasts aren't exactly "enthusiastic" to hear about.
That said, under normal consumer use, it will make little difference to the overall longevity of the computer. Use cases that are constantly modifying the whole data set will see little difference as the new firmware will not need to rewrite what is essentially fresh data. Use cases that see little writing will require the firmware to initiate rewrites, but they aren't consuming their write cycles at a very fast rate to begin with. However, use cases that constantly write and rewrite a small set of data while maintaining a large set of data that remains unmodified would result in a notably (though not excessively) lower life expectancy.
vladx - Monday, April 25, 2016 - link
"Also, the fix doesn't work for machines that are powered down for large periods at a time as it requires power to monitor and execute the rewrites."First, you shouldn't use an SSD for cold storage. Secondly, those periodic rewrites are insignificant to the life expectancy from user perspective, Just read the Techreport series on SSD endurance (http://techreport.com/review/26523/the-ssd-enduran... and you'll see that manufacturers are very conservative on the endurance numbers on consumer drives. They intentionally do it in order to not have consumer products take a piece of the enterprise pie.
And lastly, my point was the performance is back and like I mentioned without any real-world impact so stop spreading FUD like so many others on this site.
Alexvrb - Monday, April 25, 2016 - link
Yeah I've got at least one machine with an 840 Evo and it has been working great. 850 Evo is better, of course, I've got one of those too. I'd definitely trust one to at least not corrupt data over some of the other offerings (I'm looking at you, OCZ). Performance on my 850 Evo is hard to beat for the money, as well. This 750 Evo however, looks weak by comparison. They should sell it to OEMs cheap, and anyone in the retail market should shop around more.Oxford Guy - Monday, May 2, 2016 - link
There's a difference between a fix and a kludgy workaround.Ascaris - Tuesday, April 26, 2016 - link
Indeed. My Samsung 840 Pro 128GB in my main (desktop) PC has been in service for 2 years, four months, and has accumulated 32.55TB written. SMART indicates it still has 84% of its wear-leveling count remaining. That's another 11.8 years at this rate (and it will probably live well beyond its rated limit, if it is anything like the torture-tested 840 Pro as reported by TR). It would be near the end of its rated life if it were the 750 Evo.vladx - Tuesday, April 26, 2016 - link
@Ascaris: 84%? My 840 Evo is still 97% after 21 TB of written data so wear-leveling rating might not drop linearly.leexgx - Wednesday, April 27, 2016 - link
@vladxsmaller the SSD faster the health drops
bigger SSDs has more NAND space so they last longer the bigger the SSD is just companies tend to rate all there SSDs with the same say 50 to 150TB rated life/warranty void for all sizes but that is just for warranty that's all so they are not used in server type loads (most of them can do at least 500TB before they start to fail or show uncorrectable errors or high relocate sectors)
leexgx - Wednesday, April 27, 2016 - link
@Ascaristhe TR test on all them drives was interesting and the the 840 Pro drive can be used way past its rated life past 2PB of data can be possible it even was 0 error free even with the power failure up to the point it suddenly failed with no warning which probably was a full NAND chip fail (as that site that was trashing them with random write to a bunch of SSDs so the drive might of had more writes if its was sequential writes, the test would of concluded a lot sooner if sequential writes was used)
haukionkannel - Friday, April 22, 2016 - link
If you sell 10000 computers, that 10$ will make 100000$ Profit. And 10000 computers is a very small Number... 20 cent is big money to production cost. Do you ever wonder why Intel use very crap thermal paste in their consumer prosessors? It is 1 cent cheaper or even more than better stuff, and Also goes old soon enough after the warranty goes old...They Are making Profit, not making the best bang for the back to the customers...
JimmiG - Monday, April 25, 2016 - link
Yeah, that's why this drive is primarily aimed at system builders. If you're buying a 120 or 250GB drive for your own system, it's silly to not pay $10 more for the 850 Evo.