Samsung Expands 750 EVO SSD Lineup with 500 GB Model, Changes Positioning
by Anton Shilov on May 25, 2016 2:50 PM EST
When Samsung released its 750 EVO lineup of SSDs based on planar TLC NAND flash memory earlier this year, it seemed like a big surprise, as the company was first to ramp up production of 3D NAND memory and to use it for SSDs. Apparently, Samsung not only decided to expand the lineup with a 500 GB model, but also to make such drives available worldwide and even change their positioning.
Earlier this year Samsung introduced its 750 EVO drives with 120 GB (MZ-750120BW) and 250 GB (MZ-750250BW) capacities, which are based on simplified version of the company’s MGX controller with only two cores and TLC NAND chips produced using 16 nm fabrication process. The drives are equipped with 256 MB of DRAM cache, AES-256 encryption, and support various performance improving technologies typically found in TLC-based SSDs, such as pseudo-SLC cache and so on. Samsung’s 750 EVO 500 GB drive (MZ-750500BW) is based on the company’s 16 nm TLC NAND and offers similar levels of performance as already released SSDs — up to 540 MB/s sequential read and up to 520 MB/s sequential write speed. Besides, the higher-capacity version is rated for 100 TB total bytes written (TBW) endurance.
| Samsung TLC SATA SSD Comparison | |||||||
| Drive | 750 EVO 120 GB | 750 EVO 250 GB | 750 EVO 500 GB |
850 EVO 120 GB | 850 EVO 250 GB | 850 EVO 500 GB |
|
| Controller | dual-core MGX | MGX | MGX | ||||
| NAND | Samsung 16nm TLC | Samsung 32-layer 128Gbit TLC V-NAND | |||||
| DRAM | 256MB | 256 MB | 512 MB | 1 GB | |||
| Sequential Read | 540 MB/s | ||||||
| Sequential Write | 520 MB/s | ||||||
| 4KB Random Read | 94K IOPS | 97K IOPS | 97K IOPS | 94K IOPS | 97K IOPS | ||
| 4KB Random Write | 88K IOPS | ||||||
| 4KB Random Read QD1 | 10K IOPS | 10K IOPS | |||||
| 4KB Random Write QD1 | 35K IOPS | 40K IOPS | |||||
| Encryption | AES-256, TCG Opal 2.0, IEEE-1667 (eDrive) | ||||||
| Endurance | 35 TB | 70 TB | 100 TB | 75TB | 150 TB | ||
| Warranty | Three years | Five years | |||||
Initially, Samsung positioned its 750 EVO SSDs as inexpensive solutions primarily designed for system builders in select markets, but with the addition of a 500 GB model into the family, the company also changes positioning of the lineup. Starting from early June, the 750 EVO family of SSDs will be offered in 50 countries, including the U.S., Europe, China, Korea, and other regions. Moreover, the drives will be marketed not only to system builders, but also to end-users.
The 750 EVO SSDs are positioned just below the V-NAND-based 850 EVO and replace the discontinued 840 EVO, which faced writing performance degradation scandal and caused some troubles for Samsung. Despite formal positioning, performance levels of the 750 EVO are very similar to those offered by the 850 EVO drives. However, endurance of the planar TLC-based drives is unsurprisingly somewhat lower compared to the 850 EVO (which uses 3D V-NAND). Besides, the more advanced drives also come with a five-year warranty.
The 750 EVO 500 GB’s MSRP is $149.99 and the drive is covered with a three-year warranty (or 100 TB TBW). By contrast, the 120 GB version costs $54.98, whereas the 250 GB model is priced at $83.99 at Amazon.
Source: Samsung
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vladx - Friday, May 27, 2016 - link
"That said, I have never seen an 840 EVO outright fail, but I have seen them, even with the latest firmware, have read performance on par with a hard drive."Sorry but I can't trust the validity of this claim since my main SSD is a 2 years old 840 EVO that has no performance issues after updating to the latest firmware and yes it's as fast as when it was new and almost full. So I hate to reiterate but please stop spreading FUD about this drive.
Gadgety - Friday, May 27, 2016 - link
I have the 840EVO, too, 250GB for which I paid 193 USD about 2 years ago. It was dog slow after a while and I had to spend a lot of time to make it work properly again. I think Samsung should have said "here get a discount on the next gen" instead.eek2121 - Thursday, May 26, 2016 - link
You aren't very bright are you? The 840 EVO works perfectly fine. It's my main SSD in my system, and has been for a long time.Meteor2 - Friday, May 27, 2016 - link
Well that's the most rubbish comment I've seen in a long time.JoeyJoJo123 - Wednesday, May 25, 2016 - link
"However, endurance of the planar TLC-based drives is unsurprisingly somewhat lower compared to the 850 EVO (which uses 3D V-NAND)."Please stop mentioning SSD endurance in any articles unless a normal consumer with average day-to-day usage has a reasonable chance of actually exhausting the endurance of the SSD during its usable lifespan (equal to the warranty period + a year or two).
SSD endurance hasn't been a problem yet for anyone but possibly the earliest adopters of SATA 2 SSDs. I have literally never heard of anyone saying anything resembling "Man, I gotta go buy another SSD because mine bricked itself because I wore out the NAND too much from excess usage." The reality of what ends up happening is that most SSDs (even TLC NAND based) will be able to read/write around a petabyte or more during its usable lifespan (except for some Intel branded ones which are programmed to brick itself after a preset amount of read/write operations), often giving many noticeable signs of death before it actually bricks itself.
And then the worrisome sheep who read tech articles and believe themselves to be more knowledgeable than others will debate on SSD endurance and bring it up in conversations as if it mattered to non-enterprise users.
The fact is, SSD manufacturers are aware of average SSD usage patterns and are aware of the typical endurance of their SSDs. They conveniently design product warranties to be an amount of time so that the sheer majority of users will have an expired warranty long before the SSD exhausts its NAND endurance.
tl;dr:
Talk about warranty periods, not SSD endurance, because the former actually matters when the SSD stops functioning, whereas the latter will never be an issue (unless the user literally bought a consumer hard drive for enterprise-grade disk I/O based workloads) due to the warranty period not extending far enough.
Alexvrb - Wednesday, May 25, 2016 - link
More information only benefits us. I agree that the issue is sometimes overstated but consider this: If all the tech journalists / reviewers worldwide said "it's a non-issue" and never reported on it ever, what do you think would have happened? For consumer-level drives, manufacturers would have ceased to compete on (or care about) endurance, stopped publishing those numbers, and in some cases produced even-cheaper drives with crap endurance. The more drives die out of warranty (especially OEM boxes which do NOT carry the same warranty) the more drives they sell. The less space they have to reserve for endurance concerns, the more money they can squeeze. I mean why NOT keep them honest and mindful of endurance, even if, for most users, it's a non-issue?You can just skip the parts where they talk about endurance. Or rant about it every article. That's good too.
aryonoco - Wednesday, May 25, 2016 - link
Thank you for bringing this up, and I completely agree with your point.Write endurance should be available somewhere on a spec table, but for consumer purposes, the amount of space that AT dedicates to it is completely ludicrous.
For the great majority of users, data retention is a much more valid concern than write endurance.
Kristian Vättö - Thursday, May 26, 2016 - link
Endurance and data retention go hand in hand. JEDEC's consumer SSD spec states that drives must retain data for one year once the the endurance rating is exceeded.Quad5Ny - Monday, May 30, 2016 - link
It would be interesting to see this tested in reviews. I remember reading a PowerPoint presentation or a whitepaper that mentioned simulating years passing by baking the drive at certain temperatures for a short period of time.bug77 - Friday, May 27, 2016 - link
Actually, with modern OSes running indexing in the background, antivirus doing their periodic stuff, automatic updates, snapshots and what not, the end user has little control on how much writing happens on their drives.