Samsung SSD 750 Evo review: Very fast SSD performance at a slight premium

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.

8.0

Samsung SSD 750 Evo

$150 at Amazon

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.

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.

Available in 120GB, 250GB and 500GB capacities at a current cost of $50 (£35, AU$70), $80 (£55, AU$110), and $150 (£105, AU$200) 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 considerably 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.

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 option comes from 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 or more.) Since most computers nowadays come with plenty of RAM (or you can add more relatively expensively), having RAPID as kind of a turbo boost makes the drive a lot more appealing.

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 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.