The Samsung 750 EVO (120GB & 250GB) SSD Review: A Return To Planar NAND

AnandTech 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.