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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Shadow7037932 - Friday, April 22, 2016 - link
The prices aren't competitive. The Ultra II in particular tends to go on sale rather often for around $50.Shadow7037932 - Friday, April 22, 2016 - link
Also, if it's anything like the price drop we saw with the 850 EVOs, this could drop down to ~$50 or so in a few months I think.barleyguy - Friday, April 22, 2016 - link
This drive hasn't been out long enough to know what price it will go on sale for. So I consider any comments on pricing pretty irrelevant.Outside of that, there are only 3 brands of SSD I trust my data to, which is Intel, Crucial/Micron, and Samsung. I'll pay more for those 3 brands than I will other brands, because of reliability.
AkulaClass - Friday, April 22, 2016 - link
As 250GB low cost I would grab a SanDisk Ultra II.barleyguy - Friday, April 22, 2016 - link
8 of the 48 reviews of that drive on NewEgg are "worked great until it died in a month and I lost my data". As I said in another post, Intel, Crucial, and Samsung are IMO on a different tier of reliability than everybody else.Shadow7037932 - Saturday, April 23, 2016 - link
I like how you're saying Samsung there without considering the issues they've had with the 840. Out of all three you mentioned, only Intel has had solid SSDs since the first gen.barleyguy - Saturday, April 23, 2016 - link
I actually own an 840 Evo in my daughter's laptop. The issues with it never involved data loss or "early death", only degraded performance. Even in its degraded performance mode it still feels faster than a hard drive. And the patches they issued to "fix" it work pretty well to restore it back to SSD-like performance.So, in short, I still trust Samsung on the SSD front way more than Sandisk.
Though I don't disagree that Intel makes excellent SSDs. They're the way to go for a "critical main desktop" type application.
andrewaggb - Sunday, April 24, 2016 - link
I was going to say that as well. I have an 840 evo in my machine and I haven't lost any data. I regret purchasing it... but it works. The only SSD I've had die so far was a Kingston V100. Still have a couple intel 320 series ssd's running strong, a couple sandisk ones (don't recall the model numbers) that are working and a crucial M500 that is working.Dwedit - Sunday, April 24, 2016 - link
I had the old Intel X25-M, and it had a catastrophic failure where the disk name changed to "BAD CONTEXT" and size changed to 8MB.K_Space - Wednesday, April 27, 2016 - link
X25-M (version 2) still going strong here just not as a main drive since 80Gb is puny. I have both SD Ultra II (960Gb) and 2x Extreme Pro (480Gb) going with no problems. The Extreme Pro was purchased straight after Anadtech glowing review particularly with its 10 years warranty. Not sure what the warranty is for the Ultra II but wouldn't be surprised if its 5+. For every review that says: my SSD died, you'll get a "my SSD is alive & well" so take em with a pinch of salt. It all depends on usage scenario and user expertise and we know how variable that can be.