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 - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The empty-drive performance of the ADATA Ultimate SU750 on the Heavy test approaches that of the mainstream SATA SSDs, but when the test is run on a full drive its performance drops down to be on par with the other entry-level drives: the Toshiba TR200 DRAMless TLC SSD, and the Samsung 860 QVO with QLC NAND.
The average and 99th percentile latency scores repeat the same story: the SU750 handles the Heavy test well when run on an empty drive, but when full it struggles like other entry-level drives.
The average write latency for the SU750 on the Heavy test shows a much larger full-drive performance penalty than the average read latency scores, but in either case it comes out well ahead of the other two entry-level SATA drives.
The 99th percentile read and write latencies from the SU750 are both competitive with mainstream SATA drives when the test is run on a full drive. When full, the 99th percentile read latency on the SU750 takes a hit that makes it slightly slower than the Toshiba TR200. For writes, the SU750's QoS is hurt quite a bit more, but the TR200 shows just how bad things could have been.
Power consumption is again pretty high for the SU750, especially for the full-drive test run. The two NVMe drives somewhat obscure the big gap that separates the SU750 and 860 QVO from the rest of the SATA SSDs.
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romrunning - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link
This whole suite of tests reminds me of how terrible QLC is for performance, whether in the woeful Intel 660p or this ADATA SU750. YMMV, but I'm okay with never buying one.Also, I can remember back in the days when I first saw Realtek pop up in networking. There were usually issues, and then you had to replace them with a 3Com NIC. But "cheap" is king, and guess who is still around. Now you know what your parents felt like when they reminisce about the "good old days".
extide - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link
This drive does not use QLC.romrunning - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link
Sorry - true, it doesn't use QLC; the SU750 is just DRAM-less.PeachNCream - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link
ADATA can make SSD performance suck even without QLC and price it as if it is a competitive product. That's sort of an accomplishment in its own way.brucethemoose - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link
I wonder how low they could go with QLC instead of TLC. Maybe the extra work required to get QLC even functioning on this Realtek controller would negate any savings.name99 - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link
Remember not everyone NEEDS every aspect of performance!I would prefer to have my audio-visual library on SSD so that searching is faster (waiting a few seconds for drive spin-up is always irritating) but no aspect of QLC (eg reduced total write volume, or slow writes) is problematic for that use case...
PeachNCream - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link
Agreed, but if the SSD in question is slower than a different SSD with similar endurance and capacity that is priced the same, why get less for your money just because your p0rn collection doesn't need low latency responsiveness?Samus - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link
The thing is, the 660p and now 665p are great drives for average users. You get rock bottom price (though the drives mysteriously spiked up by 30% recently) and a decently reliable drive that delivers good burst transfer rates. Write performance is fine, still faster than a SATA drive until the pSLC is cached.rrinker - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link
Would really like to see some "low end" 2 or eve 4TB SSDs. Even a low end SSD is faster than a spinny disk, and I'd love to build my whole server with SSD - a pair of higher end ones for a fast cache, with a bunch of low end ones for the mass storage.FunBunny2 - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link
"Even a low end SSD is faster than a spinny disk"true, but HDD that get past infant suicide can last a very long time.