Introduction
The Samsung 750 EVO 500GB
Mainstream Reaches High-End SATA3
Samsung has released the Samsung 750 EVO SSD in larger capacity size. As such we review the 500 GB version of this SSD that offers enthusiast class speed but is competitive in pricing as the product is priced at €149, which boild down to 30 cents per GB. Armed with truckloads of performance and that attractive pricing, Samsung will once again set the tone.
As you guys know, we've been testing NAND Flash based storage ever since the very beginning, and it is surprising to see where we have gotten. The SSD market is fierce and crowded though. While stability and safety of your data have become a number one priority for the manufacturers, the technology keeps advancing at a fast pace as it does, the performance numbers a good SSD offers these days are simply breathtaking! You get between 450 MB/s to 500 MB/sec on SATA3 which is the norm for a single controller based SSD. Next to that, over the past year, NAND flash memory (the storage memory used inside an SSD) has become much cheaper as well. Prices a year ago settled at just under 1 USD per GB. That was two to threefold two years ago. These days a good SSD can be found under 50 cents per GB. With parties like Samsung, Toshiba and Micron the prices now have dropped towards and below the 30 cents per GB marker. This means that SSD technology and NAND storage has gone mainstream and due to the lower prices, the volume sizes go up as well. A couple of years ago a 64 GB SSD was hot stuff, then slowly we moved to 120 GB, last year 240 GB for an SSD in a PC was the norm, upcoming year we'll transition slowly to roughly 500 GB per SSD as the norm with sub 150 USD prices. With the market being so huge, fierce and competitive, it brought us to where we are today... nice volume SSDs at acceptable prices with very fast performance. Not one test system in my lab has a HDD, everything runs on SSD while I receive and retrieve my bigger chunks of data from a NAS server here in the office. The benefits are performance, speed, low power consumption and no noise.
Samsung last week (we received our sample late) released the larger capacity version product series that many of you have been waiting for, the 750 EVO series 500GB. Samsungs 750 EVO SSD product line is powered by the company’s MGX controller that is housed inside the 850 EVO as well. A controller with a low power 2-core design, this drive will be amongst the fastest we have ever tested. It’s not just about performance though, it is about endurance as well. In a nutshell, endurance is the number of program-erase cycles an SSD has before you can't write onto it anymore. IOPS numbers are now reaching the 90,000 to 100,000 marker. Overall, the 750 series performance is maxed out at whatever your SATA3 interface can handle. Sequential reads for example performance wise are 540 MB/s and write performance is set at 520 MB/s (sequential writes). Samsung guarantees the 500 TB 750 EVO for 3 years or 100 terabytes written (TBW). Have a peek at the more budget friendly EVO, after which we'll dive into a rather in-depth review. And yes, the design and housing is the same as the 850 EVO, a little confusing we agree.
