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 - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The ADATA Ultimate SU750 actually manages to outperform one of the mainstream SATA drives on the Light test, though that's more due to the Crucial MX500 misbehaving than the SU750 being fast. When the test is run on a full drive, the SU750 drops to last place, but isn't far behind the other two entry-level SATA drives.
The average latency scores for the SU750 are fine when the Light test is run on an empty drive, and are at least better than the other entry-level drives for the full-drive test runs. The 99th percentile latency scores are similarly not too far behind mainstream SATA drives, and the full-drive latency doesn't have the QoS problems the Samsung 860 QVO experiences.
The SU750 has a bit of a problem with average read latency when the Light test is run on a full drive, but otherwise its average read and write latency scores are barely slower than typical mainstream SATA drives.
The 99th percentile read latency scores from the SU750 suffer a greater full-drive performance penalty than most other SATA drives experience, but nowhere near as bad as the 860 QVO. The SU750's 99th percentile write latency is fine for both empty and full drive test runs.
As usual, the SU750 has some of the highest energy usage scores, matched by the Samsung 860 QVO and the two NVMe drives. However, unlike the more difficult ATSB tests, the gap between the SU750 and the mainstream SATA drives is relatively small.
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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.