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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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.