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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Samus - Sunday, December 8, 2019 - link
I didn't even want to bring up Killer XDdeil - Monday, December 9, 2019 - link
Well ONLY cards where I lost sound due to broken drivers is realteck. AND coincidentally ONLY network adapter that was supposed to do full gigabit, and stopped negotiation at 10 mbps was also realteck.they can do decent hardware, but soft from them is crappiest as possible.
HollyDOL - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link
My 1st hand experience with Realtek dates back to Pentium 4 era. And it was so bad then I am still avoiding anything done by them in almost panic mode. Maybe they improved since then, but I am still not in state of mind to spend few $ to try.Gigaplex - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link
Intel was terrible in the Pentium 4 era. Do you also avoid Intel in the same way?HollyDOL - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link
Intel never had problems with functionality or output quality. For many scenarios you had better perf/$ on Athlons, but you didn't have problems having multiple computers on same network with Intel NIC having same MAC, lousy sound quality infested with noise or very low NIC performance.So no, I am not avoiding Intel same way since I never had remotely similar problems with them.
close - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link
They weren't that bad. After building a neighborhood network (100Mbps and constantly saturated with Direct Connect P2P transfers) with thousands of clients (perhaps in the 5 figures or close to), 99.9% being Realtek network chipsets I'd say many of the issues are a bit overstated. Sure Intel was (is?) better but other than crappy support in Linux at that time, there was nothing out of the ordinary bad with Realtek. Not one MAC issue, not very low performance.I'm sure those thousands are not representative of all Realtek sales but I think there must also be some bias in there where the multitude of reports on forums makes you think it's an absolute rule that they were crap. Sound cards... dunno, had them on many PCs but rarely cared about the sound back in the day.
Samus - Sunday, December 8, 2019 - link
Terrible performance maybe. But Intel has always been fairly reliable. They've had a few minor chipset recalls, and the embarrassing, but very limited Pentium III recall, but on the whole they have traditionally had less errata than AMD and quite frankly their chipsets were always the gold-standard of PC's. Their network controllers are among the best in the world.PeachNCream - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link
ADATA has gotta get out of this town, out of this town and out of L.A. - with those prices. TRIM them to around $80 for 1TB and they will have a Solid pricing State to Drive sustained sales.bananaforscale - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link
Realtek does Dallas Semi?Lord of the Bored - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link
No, Maxim did Dallas Semiconduotor.