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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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.