The ADATA Ultimate SU750 1TB SSD Review: Realtek Does Storage, Part 1
by Billy Tallis on December 6, 2019 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, 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. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
The ADATA Ultimate SU750 comes in last place for overall performance on The Destroyer. The slower tier of drives also includes the QLC-based Samsung 860 QVO, the DRAMless Toshiba TR200 and the older, smaller SU800. The mainstream SATA drives with TLC NAND and full-size DRAM caches are about twice as fast overall as the DRAMless SU750.
The latency scores for the SU750 aren't as bad as the average data rate score. The SU750 is still clearly much slower than the mainstream SATA drives whether you look at the average latency or the 99th percentile latency, but in either case some of the other low-end SATA drives manage to score significantly worse.
The SU750 is essentially tied for last place for average read latency, though the TR200 and the smaller SU800 aren't much better. For average write latency, the SU750 ends up scoring better than the other entry-level drives, including the Intel 660p NVMe/QLC drive.
The Toshiba TR200 clearly beats the SU750 for QoS of read operations, but at the cost of having by far the worst 99th percentile write latency. The SU750 avoids being such an outlier and its QoS scores for both reads and writes are typical for an entry-level drive—and worse than any of the mainstream SATA drives.
Very slow drives have to keep sucking down power for a longer period of time before completing The Destroyer, so their total energy usage usually ends up being higher than that of faster drives. In this batch of drives, the ADATA SU750 is second only to the 860 QVO for high energy consumption, with both requiring at least 50% more energy than the mainstream SATA drives.
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brucethemoose - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link
Depends how much you write. An HDD is great stone cold or hot bulk data, but I'd trust a big, cheapo SSD more for my "lukewarm" stuff, where I'm reading it every once in awhile, but not writing enough to wear the QLC out.flyingpants265 - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link
For stuff I actually don't want to lose, which is not that much (200gb or so), I have it on SSD, HDD, and another offline HDD which is unplugged.TheinsanegamerN - Sunday, December 8, 2019 - link
Your average SSD user will reach the TBW rating in 56 years of daily use. "lifespan" isnt an issue. If you ARE regularly writing terrabytes of data, the sheer speed difference of a SSD will save you truckloads of time/money.HDDs suck outside of niche massive file allocation.
FunBunny2 - Sunday, December 8, 2019 - link
"HDDs suck outside of niche massive file allocation. "and data stability.
extide - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link
Samsung 860 QVO 4TBflyingpants265 - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link
Not a bad idea, but I couldn't justify $300+ for a 4TB SSD.I think my ideal setup right now is still 1TB nvme+a few hard drives..
romrunning - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link
The Crucial MX500 2TB goes for $206-220 on Amazon. It's also a decent performer.PaulHoule - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link
I get depressed reading reviews of DRAMless SSDs. It seems like some vendors won't stop until they make an SSD which performs worse than an HDD.In general I don't agree with the rankings that Anand and other review sites give for SSDs. I don't particularly care about median performance, but I do care about performance at the 90%, 99%, etc. level -- because that is what causes your computer to freeze up for 10 seconds here or there.
Often reviewers pick out a drive that has good 50% performance, but for just a few dollars more you can get something with much better tail latency, for instance I have been happy with some Intel SSDs I've bought. If an "Intel Inside" sticker meant that a machine had an Intel SSD that would be impressive, but Intel has been damaging its brand with Atom, Celeron and things like that. They ought to take a cue from American car makers who regularly retire the names of the bad compact cars they make like Chevette, Gremlin, Neon, Cavalier, etc...
extide - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link
Yeah, I think Allyn at PCPer did the best SSD reviews tbh. He captures all of that 'last percent drop off' stuff you are talking about really well.Joahua - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link
What is the use of Dram in ssd?Can i install dram less ssd for boot drive