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 $25 gap between the 120GB ADATA SP550 and the 120GB Samsung 750 EVO is huge. In the end I suspect that most users who don't have a hard requirement for drive encryption would be better served by either a slightly lower performing drive with much better price per GB, or a higher-performing option than the 750 EVO.
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Bleakwise - Sunday, April 24, 2016 - link
I apologize for being rude but that's just not what they are made for. Paying 1,000$ for a 2tb NVME SSD just for cold storage is a lot like buying a 500,000$ super-car just to drop your kids off at school....Bleakwise - Sunday, April 24, 2016 - link
More like even up to 8k.A mechanical hard drive will roll out 150-200 GigaBYTES per second sequential read. 4k video is like 5 megaBYTES per second max. 8k would be 20, 16k would be 80. This is on h264, h265 will cut these in half, so you could watch a 32k video on something like a WD black.
I suppose if you wanted to play back something in 64k resolution you'd need an SSD though, at least until CPU/GPU tech makes h266 or h267 codec or whatever available.
Bleakwise - Sunday, April 24, 2016 - link
To be clear. The only reason content creators need NVME drives for 4k is because they work in uncompressed or intermediate formats. They need NVME drives for the same reason that a 4k bitmap is like 22 megabytes while the JPEG is just one or two.Eden-K121D - Sunday, April 24, 2016 - link
I think You meant MegaBYTES otherwise your hypothetical disk would be faster than anything on this planet LOLslowdemon21 - Friday, April 29, 2016 - link
SeaGate barracuda 195 MegaBytes per secBrokenCrayons - Friday, April 22, 2016 - link
Between the OS and software, my Windows desktop is currently using about 110GB of a 250GB hard drive. I don't game much, but there are handful of titles loaded on that system and I haven't exactly been working very hard at keeping my drive clean.On my primary computer (the desktop is more a network appliance than a day-to-day workstation as it runs headless now thanks to a combination of Steam in home streaming and VNC), a laptop with a 60GB SSD, there's about 35GB of free storage capacity, but the OS footprint is a lot smaller since it's a Linux box.
Granted, games are getting larger and a few newer titles I'm likely to play in the next year or so will make it necessary to start looking at more storage, but 250GB seems perfectly reasonable right now.
jabber - Friday, April 22, 2016 - link
Yeah just running 80GB of the 250GB 850EVO in my workstation. Having masses of software and data hanging around on a mchine seem crazy to me. Each to their own. However, most customers I see struggle to go over 60-70GB.bji - Friday, April 22, 2016 - link
This is because you guys don't pirate tons of movies and hoard them on SSD drives like some people who then complain about the cost of the media they use to store their pirated goods. I don't either, which is why the 250 GB SSD in my macbook pro is still only half full after nearly 4 years of use.bji - Friday, April 22, 2016 - link
BTW complaining about the cost of storage for pirated goods is like the ultimate douchebaggery imagineable. Not only are you ripping off people who worked to create the content you've pirated, you want to complain about how much money you have to pay to companies to produce the storage that you need to store it.StrangerGuy - Friday, April 22, 2016 - link
That's not ultimate pirate douchebaggery, it would be complaining why pirated videos are no longer available in Xvid because everybody should cater to people with decade old DVD players.