Comments Locked

54 Comments

Back to Article

  • sonny73n - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link

    Realtek does audio
    Realtek does networking
    Realtek does storage
    Debbie does Dallas
  • RadiclDreamer - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link

    Realtek may do all of these things, but it does them all poorly.
  • FunBunny2 - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link

    "Realtek may do all of these things, but it does them all poorly."

    Debbie wasn't so hot either. :):)
  • boozed - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link

    I don't know that I'd call them poor. Good value, reliable (in my experience) and good enough for the vast majority of users.

    Other options are available for enthusiasts.
  • eek2121 - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link

    The trouble is that you are talking about a few dollars for a much faster and more power efficient drive. This controller appears DOA as it brings nothing unique to the table.
  • Samus - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link

    With what Intel charges for network controllers, it’s astonishing Realtek is in business when you consider how superior an Intel NIC is while being a few dollars more. And wireless is a whole different story. I’d put Realtek at the absolute bottom of the list. Atheros/Qualcomm, Intel, Agere, Lucent, Broadcom, all have better reliability, support (which is shocking when you consider how vastly used Realtek products are) and generally - performance, than competing Realtek solutions.

    I think where Realtek scores is availability. Their volume shows commitment to OEM’s that require dependable shipping schedules. This can be as important is BOM pricing, and when you look at the numbers, it seems (and I’m speculating) Realtek designs products for volume production more than anything else. The incredibly low pin count and a 2 channel controller back this up. We are talking about possibly the most basic SATA SSD controller in production and that means they will be able to make a shitload of them really fast really cheap.

    And unfortunately OEMs will bite because they know 90% of the people buying this crap don’t care about the inner margin performance of an SSD. Most people buy on price, reliability and warranty.

    This shitty SSD May have all 3 bases covered considering the quality binning of Micron NAND.
  • close - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link

    "a few dollars more" adds up when buying by the truckload. With millions of devices that have a network chipset that's quite some money.
  • jabber - Sunday, December 8, 2019 - link

    Yeah amazing how many people don't realise how shaving just 50 cents off a product that will sell hundreds of thousands to millions will save a company a fortune and help with profit.

    A good example is to watch the documentary "Building a Faster Horse" on how Ford designed and built the 2016 iirc Ford Mustang. Every single part and component was scrutinised to see if it could be either removed/simplified or made cheaper.

    That's why Realtek exists still. Their parts are 50c cheaper than Intels.
  • Manch - Monday, December 9, 2019 - link

    Ford been making the Mustang cheaper and cheaper while charging more and more. Started with the Getrag MT-82 grenade and got worse with the crap IRS, corner cutting everywhere. Add on top of it a horrid design (Looks like a 2 door Focus) and they wonder why they're losing customers.
  • hanselltc - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link

    Killer
  • Samus - Sunday, December 8, 2019 - link

    I didn't even want to bring up Killer XD
  • deil - Monday, December 9, 2019 - link

    Well ONLY cards where I lost sound due to broken drivers is realteck. AND coincidentally ONLY network adapter that was supposed to do full gigabit, and stopped negotiation at 10 mbps was also realteck.
    they can do decent hardware, but soft from them is crappiest as possible.
  • HollyDOL - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link

    My 1st hand experience with Realtek dates back to Pentium 4 era. And it was so bad then I am still avoiding anything done by them in almost panic mode. Maybe they improved since then, but I am still not in state of mind to spend few $ to try.
  • Gigaplex - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link

    Intel was terrible in the Pentium 4 era. Do you also avoid Intel in the same way?
  • HollyDOL - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link

    Intel never had problems with functionality or output quality. For many scenarios you had better perf/$ on Athlons, but you didn't have problems having multiple computers on same network with Intel NIC having same MAC, lousy sound quality infested with noise or very low NIC performance.

    So no, I am not avoiding Intel same way since I never had remotely similar problems with them.
  • close - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link

    They weren't that bad. After building a neighborhood network (100Mbps and constantly saturated with Direct Connect P2P transfers) with thousands of clients (perhaps in the 5 figures or close to), 99.9% being Realtek network chipsets I'd say many of the issues are a bit overstated. Sure Intel was (is?) better but other than crappy support in Linux at that time, there was nothing out of the ordinary bad with Realtek. Not one MAC issue, not very low performance.

    I'm sure those thousands are not representative of all Realtek sales but I think there must also be some bias in there where the multitude of reports on forums makes you think it's an absolute rule that they were crap. Sound cards... dunno, had them on many PCs but rarely cared about the sound back in the day.
  • Samus - Sunday, December 8, 2019 - link

    Terrible performance maybe. But Intel has always been fairly reliable. They've had a few minor chipset recalls, and the embarrassing, but very limited Pentium III recall, but on the whole they have traditionally had less errata than AMD and quite frankly their chipsets were always the gold-standard of PC's. Their network controllers are among the best in the world.
  • PeachNCream - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link

    ADATA has gotta get out of this town, out of this town and out of L.A. - with those prices. TRIM them to around $80 for 1TB and they will have a Solid pricing State to Drive sustained sales.
  • bananaforscale - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link

    Realtek does Dallas Semi?
  • Lord of the Bored - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link

    No, Maxim did Dallas Semiconduotor.
  • 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.
  • brucethemoose - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link

    Depends how much you write. An HDD is great stone cold or hot bulk data, but I'd trust a big, cheapo SSD more for my "lukewarm" stuff, where I'm reading it every once in awhile, but not writing enough to wear the QLC out.
  • flyingpants265 - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link

    For stuff I actually don't want to lose, which is not that much (200gb or so), I have it on SSD, HDD, and another offline HDD which is unplugged.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Sunday, December 8, 2019 - link

    Your average SSD user will reach the TBW rating in 56 years of daily use. "lifespan" isnt an issue. If you ARE regularly writing terrabytes of data, the sheer speed difference of a SSD will save you truckloads of time/money.

    HDDs suck outside of niche massive file allocation.
  • FunBunny2 - Sunday, December 8, 2019 - link

    "HDDs suck outside of niche massive file allocation. "

    and data stability.
  • extide - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link

    Samsung 860 QVO 4TB
  • flyingpants265 - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link

    Not a bad idea, but I couldn't justify $300+ for a 4TB SSD.

    I think my ideal setup right now is still 1TB nvme+a few hard drives..
  • romrunning - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link

    The Crucial MX500 2TB goes for $206-220 on Amazon. It's also a decent performer.
  • PaulHoule - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link

    I get depressed reading reviews of DRAMless SSDs. It seems like some vendors won't stop until they make an SSD which performs worse than an HDD.

    In general I don't agree with the rankings that Anand and other review sites give for SSDs. I don't particularly care about median performance, but I do care about performance at the 90%, 99%, etc. level -- because that is what causes your computer to freeze up for 10 seconds here or there.

    Often reviewers pick out a drive that has good 50% performance, but for just a few dollars more you can get something with much better tail latency, for instance I have been happy with some Intel SSDs I've bought. If an "Intel Inside" sticker meant that a machine had an Intel SSD that would be impressive, but Intel has been damaging its brand with Atom, Celeron and things like that. They ought to take a cue from American car makers who regularly retire the names of the bad compact cars they make like Chevette, Gremlin, Neon, Cavalier, etc...
  • extide - Friday, December 6, 2019 - link

    Yeah, I think Allyn at PCPer did the best SSD reviews tbh. He captures all of that 'last percent drop off' stuff you are talking about really well.
  • Joahua - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link

    What is the use of Dram in ssd?

    Can i install dram less ssd for boot drive
  • Billy Tallis - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link

    SSDs need to keep track of what physical location each logical block address is stored at. This info changes constantly because flash memory needs wear leveling, and this info needs to be accessed for every read or write operation the host system issues. Most SSDs use a flash translation layer that deals with 4kB chunks, which means the full address mapping table requires 1GB for each 1TB of storage. Mainstream SSDs use DRAM to hold this table, because it's much faster than doing an extra flash read before each read or write operation can be completed. DRAMless SSDs can cache a small portion of that table (typically a few MBs or tens of MBs) within the controller itself or using the NVMe Host Memory Buffer feature.

    DRAMless SSDs can work as a boot drive, but they're slower than mainstream drives that have the full 1GB per 1TB DRAM buffer.
  • PaulHoule - Tuesday, December 10, 2019 - link

    The block size of an SSD is usually larger than the block size presented to the OS. The SSD can only erase a large group of blocks at once, so it has a flash translation layer that needs to keep track of things like "Block X seen by the OS is really stored in Subblock Y of Physical Block Z". It has to access that data every time it reads or writes, so it helps for that data to be in DRAM.

    DRAM is also good for write caching; under ordinary circumstances it is a big performance win to buffer writes to RAM before you really do them so you can bundle writes so the SSD can do them efficiently.

    Current DRAMless SSDs keep the lookup tables on the SSD itself, which is slower than RAM.

    There is a standard for an NVMe device to steal some RAM from the host, which might be a good option. Also there is a standard for NVMe zoned namespaces which would let the host manage the drive more directly, put that together with a revolution in the OS and you could get something which is simple, high performance, and cheap, but that revolution is happening in the data center now, not at the client.
  • Goodspike - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link

    What's with these brand names?

    To me Adata means no data. Sandisk means without disk. These are not good names for storage devices!
  • Gills - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link

    Realtek abandoned me on Windows 10 sound drivers for the many Toshiba POS terminals I'm tasked with updating from Windows XP and 7, so I'm not jumping onboard with anything they do anytime soon.
  • supdawgwtfd - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link

    So going from one unsupported EOL O/S to another soon to be?

    That doesn't seem like good management.
  • Gills - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link

    Worded that poorly, sorry - we're upgrading everything to Windows 10.
  • FunBunny2 - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link

    "So going from one unsupported EOL O/S to another soon to be?

    That doesn't seem like good management."

    spend some time as the 'IT manager' at any small business; this sort of driving the infrastructure into the ground is SoP.
  • PeachNCream - Monday, December 9, 2019 - link

    To be completely fair to RealTek, if your company's point-of-sale hardware originally shipped with XP, writing Win10 drivers for that audio hardware was probably not high on anyone's list of priorities. For point-of-sale computers manufactured and shipped with Windows 7, that might be more of a problem given the less obsolete nature of the equipment and yes, I understand that POS systems are expected to have a long service life, but XP was first up for sale in late 2001 and extended suport ended in 2014.
  • Billy Tallis - Monday, December 9, 2019 - link

    FYI, extended support for the last POS edition of XP only ended 8 months ago.
  • PeachNCream - Tuesday, December 10, 2019 - link

    Ah thanks. I didn't realize that POS variants had a longer support lifespan.
  • rocketman122 - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link

    After ocz 64gb fiasco, I no longer buy anything from new companies that havent proven themselves over the long run. Also from crucial who sold defect ssd knowingly. Only samsung for now as they are solid drives and excellent performance, even if they arent the cheapest
  • The_Assimilator - Saturday, December 7, 2019 - link

    Completely broken idle power management on a 2019 controller... how did this turd ever get past the first engineering review at Realtek, never mind making it into an actual drive at ADATA? And why did ADATA decide to pair it with far better-quality flash than it deserves? Ugh.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Sunday, December 8, 2019 - link

    "Realtek"

    "Engineering review"

    Found your problem here.
  • jabber - Sunday, December 8, 2019 - link

    Any MLC drives that come my way are tested and if found to be 99% health or better are a keeper. They do not get passed on anymore. I'm a keeping them!

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now