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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Ascaris - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link
Isn't that the truth! Nearly every item comes with glowing reviews mixed in with "mine died in xx time, and I am never going to buy from $company ever again." Consumer routers and hard drives seem particularly bad in that way-- if I avoided all of the ones with horror stories, I'd never have either of them.Another thing people tend to overlook in reliability is the role of a good power supply. A cheap PSU can slowly sap the life from all the components in the system by introducing unacceptable levels of ripple, and you'd never know that was a cause or partial cause of the failure. On a laptop with the brick-style power supply, it is a good idea to replace a failed unit with an OEM unit of recent manufacture (less chance of dried-up caps) than some eBay special of unknown origin (other than to say China, which is where the OEM one came from too, almost certainly).
For desktops, the PSU is something people sometimes skimp on. I've never actually had a prebuilt desktop, but I would bet a lot of them have cheap PSUs, as it is probably a place where pennies can be pinched without a huge increase in RMAs before the warranty expires. I looked at new PCs on the site of one of the major online sellers about a year ago, and I was surprised at how many current models still had 120/240v switches on the PSU, which shows that they are older models without active PFC. That does not necessarily mean they're of poor quality, but it does make me wonder about them.
BrokenCrayons - Friday, April 22, 2016 - link
I think it needs to come down in price before it'll be an acceptable sort of purchase.zepi - Friday, April 22, 2016 - link
SSD's have lost a lot by being so hamstrung by their interfaces. CPU's have limited number of PCI-e connections and motherboards very little space for M.2 slots. SATA 3 is slow and bad protocol for SSD so that race to the bottom is only thing that is of any interest in 2.5" drives.TheinsanegamerN - Friday, April 22, 2016 - link
SATA 3 may not be super fast, but the only observable difference, IME, between an m.2 drive and a sata drive was 2 seconds on boot. Unless you are a content creator working with laarge video/pictures, m.2 has little to offer over sata.Especially given that 2TB sata ssds exist, while m.2 is limited to 512GB, and that 512GB m.2 is more expensive than a 1TB sata ssd. And the ehat that m.2 drives give off compared to sata.
Margalus - Friday, April 22, 2016 - link
It may be "cheap", but it's worthless in my opinion. Only 120GB or 250GB, pretty much too small for anything except a boot drive. If there are no 1TB drives, why bother?TheinsanegamerN - Friday, April 22, 2016 - link
Believe it or not, many people could fit their computer needs in 250GB.I only use about 500GB between all of the games I actually play, and the OS itself.
Meteor2 - Friday, April 22, 2016 - link
Mmmm, I think a lot of people have digital media collections now. I have no DVDs or Blu Rays, but 600 GB of films and TV series.barleyguy - Friday, April 22, 2016 - link
Video doesn't need SSD levels of performance. Any modern spinning disk is fast enough to play video, even up to 4K.Personally, my video server machine is a 250 GB MX200 M-SATA SSD and a 4 TB hard drive.
Meteor2 - Saturday, April 23, 2016 - link
Absolutely but I want a single high-performance disc.Bleakwise - Sunday, April 24, 2016 - link
Why do you want an SSD for cold storage backups? That's just silly.