Hewlett-Packard SSD EX900 M.2 SSD Review

By David Ramsey

Manufacturer: Hewlett-Packard Corp.
Product Name: HP SSD EX900 M.2
Part Number: 2YY44AA#ABC
UPC: 192018318311 EAN: 6955914605329
MSRP: $59.99 (120GB), $99.99 (250GB), $179.99 (500GB)

Full Disclosure: Hewlett-Packard provided the product sample used in this article.

If there’s a technology company that truly needs no introduction, it’s surely Hewlett-Packard. Literally founded in a garage in Palo Alto, CA in 1947, their first product, the HP200A Audio Oscillator, shook up the industry. Their business has expanded to cover the entire spectrum of professional and consumer computers and test equipment, and today Benchmark Reviews has in hand the new HP SSD EX900 M.2 solid state drive for testing.

Specifications

Capacity	120 / 250 / 500GB
Connector	PCIE Gen 3×4, m.2 “M key”
Form Factor	2280
NAND	TLC NAND
Sustained sequential I/O	2100MB/s, 1500MB/s (R/W)
Interface	NVMe 1.3 register interface and command set
Warranty	3 years

Solid State vs Hard Disk

No matter how fast your processor, memory, or video card is, your computer will still be limited by its slowest component: the hard disk. While hard disk speed has improved tremendously since the “early days”, with large caches and 10,000RPM spindle speeds, even the fastest hard disk’s performance is glacial compared to the rest of the computer. The situation only gets worse with modern pre-emptive multitasking operating systems, where dozens of threads are running simultaneously and competing for your disk’s limited response time and bandwidth.

Consider: the average time to move a high-performance hard disk’s read/write head to a new track will be less than 10ms, which seems pretty fast. But your CPU is galloping along at billions of cycles per second, and will spend a significant amount of its time just waiting for the hard disk to fulfill its last request. Hard disk performance has plateaued in the last few years, running up against the physical limitations of spindle speeds, magnetic media density, and head servomotor performance. At the end of the day, disks are limited by the fact that they’re comprised of physical, moving parts.

With no moving parts, Solid State Drive technology removes this bottleneck. The difference an SSD makes to operational response times and program speeds is dramatic: while a faster video card makes your games faster, and a faster processor makes compute-bound tasks faster, Solid State Drive technology makes your entire system faster, improving initial response times by more than 450x (45,000%) for applications and Operating System software, when compared to their mechanical HDD counterparts. The biggest mistake PC hardware enthusiasts make with regard to SSD technology is grading them based on bandwidth speed alone. File transfer speeds are important, but only so long as the operational I/O performance can sustain that bandwidth under load.

Bandwidth Speed vs Operational Performance

As we’ve explained in our SSD Benchmark Tests: SATA IDE vs AHCI Mode guide, Solid State Drive performance revolves around two dynamics: bandwidth speed (MB/s) and operational performance I/O per second (IOPS). These two metrics work together, but one may be more important than the other. Consider this analogy: bandwidth determines how much cargo a ship can transport in one voyage, and operational IOPS performance is how fast that ship moves. By understanding this and applying it to SSD storage, there is a clear importance set on each variable depending on the task at hand.

For casual users, especially those with laptop or desktop computers that have been upgraded to use an SSD, the naturally quick response time is enough to automatically improve the user experience. Bandwidth speed is important, but only to the extent that operational performance meets the minimum needs of the system. If an SSD has a very high bandwidth speed but a low operational performance, it will take longer to load applications and boot the computer into Windows than if the SSD offered a higher IOPS performance.