Why you can trust Tom's Hardware
Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
Conclusion
Because SATA devices have little to no room left for innovation, power efficiency and BOM cost are the two major design influencers of modern controllers, like the one in the Ultimate SU750. Overall, in light of better-established competitors in the market, the small, two-channel Realtek controller did fairly well for the SU750’s performance in our tests. especially considering it has no DRAM.
In testing, it hit the performance numbers it is rated for and did fairly well in most of our application testing. Although it isn’t the most power-efficient design, it managed outperformed the Crucial BX500 and QLC V-NAND based Samsung 860 QVO in PCMark 8, SYSmark 2014 SE, and even our 50GB file copy testing.
For a tiny two-channel DRAMless controller, it’s doing pretty good. The downside is, however, that sustained writes can result in slower write speeds. Fortunately, this occurs only after the dynamic pSLC cache fills, which should be fairly uncommon in its use. For the times that is does happen, you will just have to wait.
The Adata Ultimate SU750 trails most mainstream alternatives in value to boot. At the moment, pricing needs a little more work. At the time of writing, it is priced higher options like the Crucial MX500 and WD Blue 3D. The SU750 features a short 3-year warranty while many alternatives feature 5-year warranties. And, that isn’t even mentioning Intel’s 660p, which easily outperforms it and is cheaper than the whole bunch. If you don’t need the 2.5” 7mm SATA form factor, then we’d recommend looking into that or other M.2 NVMe solutions instead.
Why this review features Intel SSD? They are M2 drives, not SATA. It is pointless, out of context comparison which makes this whole review look like author was chilling for Intel.
So in 1 TB guise, the Adata costs $10 more than the 1 TB Crucial MX500?
Not a good strategy.
At the moment, they are cheaper drives where I'm. 34 euros vs 44 euros. Adata is a great budget option, but Crucial MX500 is simply a better SSD. More solidly built, longer warranty, generally faster and better performing.
