Samsung SSD 750 Evo review – CNET

The Good The Samsung SSD 750 Evo is speedy and costs less than other Samsung solid-state drives. The drive includes helpful software and can use your computer’s internal memory to get a significant speed boost.

The Bad The drive is more expensive than competing SSDs, and capacity tops out at just 500GB.

The Bottom Line The Samsung 750 Evo is an moderately expensive SSD that won’t let you down in the speed department.

That’s right, that’s not a typo. You’re reading about the Samsung SSD 750 Evo, not the 850 Evo that came out almost two years ago.

The new 750 Evo is Samsung’s latest budget solid-state drive (SSD) and is actually quite different from the 850. For one, it uses an older type of memory, called 2D Planar NAND. It also has a shorter warranty period — three years. Although two years older, the 850 Evo uses a more recent 3D memory type, called 3D Vertical NAND, which delivers significantly more storage space on the same number of physically wafer bits, and it includes a five-year warranty.

PCMark storage performacne

Samsung SSD 750 Evo

4986

284.78

Samsung SSD 850 Evo

4983

276.16

Crucial MX200

4968

256.94

Transcend SSD370S

4927

210.4

SanDisk Ultra II

4922

208.55

OCZ Vector 180

4921

204.04

OCZ ACR 100 series

4948

203.72

Toshiba Q300

4894

186.68

OCZ Trion 100

4875

175.38

Legend:

Storage score
Storage bandwith (MB/s)

Note:

Longer bars mean better performance

Available in 120GB, 250GB and 500GB capacities at a current cost of $50 (£34, AU$67), $80 (£55, AU$107), and $150 (£103, AU$201), respectively, the new 750 Evo is somewhere between $4 and $10 cheaper than the 850 Evo depending on which capacity you choose. In fact, it’s currently the most affordable of Samsung’s SSDs. Compared to non-Samsung SSDs though, such as the Crucial BX200, or the SanDisk SSD Plus, it’s noticeably more expensive. But the 750 Evo makes up for its premium in speed and features. In testing, the 500GB version was the fastest among all budget drives to date. It was even slightly faster than the 250GB version of the 850 Evo in some tests, likely thanks to its newer firmware.

CNET SSD copy performance

Crucial MX200

190.3

433.49

412.46

Samsung SSD 850 Evo

182.78

114.45

205.63

Samsung SSD 850 Evo

182.78

114.45

205.63

Samsung SSD 750 Evo

180

146.45

203.67

Toshiba Q300

165.67

355.6

202.7

OCZ ACR 100

163.53

289.39

385.71

Transcend SSD370S

150.69

311.73

390.08

SanDisk Ultra II

126.49

210.21

319.23

OCZ Trion 100

124.19

185.35

352.32

Legend:

As OS drive (read and write)
As secondary drive (write only)
As secondary drive (read only)

Note:

Measured in megabytes per second. Longer bars mean better performance.

What’s more, like other Samsung drives that have come out in the last three years, the 750 Evo works with the Samsung Magician software to offer some useful customization. The most interesting among them is a feature called Real-time Accelerated Processing of I/O Data (RAPID). RAPID uses your computer’s available system memory (RAM) as an input/output cache to boost the SSD’s performance. In our testing, RAPID noticeably improved performance as long as the computer had a large amount of RAM (4GB and more.) Since most computers nowadays come with plenty of RAM (or you can add more for relatively little expense), having RAPID as kind of a turbo boost makes the drive a lot more appealing.

View full gallery

The Samsung Magician software allows users to easily customize the SSD 750 Evo.

Screenshot by Dong Ngo/CNET

All things considered, the 750 Evo is another excellent SSD from Samsung that will make your computer — especially one that still uses a regular hard drive — much faster. But if you’re really on a budget, some of the SSDs on this list will give you comparable performance improvement while saving you up to 25 percent of the 750’s cost. And if you want a high-capacity drive, the 850 Evo — which is available in up to 2TB capacity — is an excellent (but still expensive) alternative.