The Samsung 750 EVO (120GB & 250GB) SSD Review: A Return To Planar NAND
by Billy Tallis on April 22, 2016 8:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer
The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage and unlike our Iometer tests, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, a few data points about its latency, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
The Destroyer has earned its name here. The 750 EVO is clearly the slowest modern SSD on this test, showing that it is not suitable for sustained intense workloads with a high volume of writes. Almost any other SSD currently on the market will perform better under pressure, including competing TLC drives.
The 750 EVO also sets new records for slow responses, with average service times on par with standard hard drive seek times. Though since The Destroyer has an average queue depth of about 5.5, a mechanical hard drive would still be several times worse by this metric. Conversely, the best MLC SSDs are almost ten times quicker than the 750 EVO.
With over 10% of operations taking more than 10ms, we can't quite refer to them as outliers anymore. At the 100ms threshold, the 750 EVO has twice as many outliers as anything else.
The substantially higher energy usage of the 750 EVOs is a straightforward consequence of them taking much longer than everything else to complete the test: The 120GB 750 EVO took just over 17 hours to complete this test while the 120GB PNY CS1311 took only 13.5 hours and the 128GB 850 Pro needed only 10 hours.
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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.