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.
| 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 |
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.
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.
HP offers two versions of their new m.2 SSD line: the EX920 series and the one we have in hand, the EX900 series. The main difference is that the EX920 series uses a Silicon Motion SM2262 controller with integrated DRAM, while the less expensive EX900 uses a 2263XT DRAM-less controller. Normally this would mean significantly less performance, but the Host Memory Buffer technology included in the Windows 10 Creator Update allocates part of your system RAM to hold the SSD’s map table, which should help mitigate any performance loss.
The SSD EX900 M.2 comes in a clear plastic blister pack with a single screw to secure it in your m.2 socket.
Eschewing a colorful heat spreader, HP covers the controller and NAND memory chips with stickers, but we know the controller is Silicon Motion’s 2263XT and the memory is Micron’s new 64-layer TLC NAND.
The rear of the 500GB drive is devoid of any components.
Installed in our Z270 test system, the plain EX900 visually disappears into the surrounding circuity….
…although a minuscule red activity LED does light up during read/write operations.
There’s no utility software included with this drive, so let’s dive right into the performance testing in the next section.
When we test storage devices, the two main metrics to consider are access time and transfer rate. Simply put, access time is the time is takes the storage device to start delivering data once the request has been received, while transfer rate is how fast (megabytes per second) the data comes once the transfer operation begins. With a hard disk, data transfer cannot begin until the disk’s head servo physically moves the read/write head to the correct track, and the rotation of the disk brings the designated sector under the head. Although modern servos are very fast, in the best case you’re still looking at several milliseconds to do this, while an SSD’s access time is always under a millisecond. The disadvantage is even worse if the data isn’t all in a contiguous space on the disk, since the head will have to be repositioned on the fly, leading to more delays.
Early consumer SSDs actually had slower transfer rates than the best hard disks, although their instantaneous access times more than made up for it. The zenith of consumer hard disk performance was probably reached in 2012 with the release of the Western Digital Velociraptor 1 terabyte disk. Spinning at 10,000RPM, this disk could under ideal circumstances (i.e. a synthetic bandwidth test) reach a sequential transfer rate of over 230MB/s. Keep this figure in mind as you read this review.
Early on in our SSD coverage, Benchmark Reviews published an article which detailed Solid State Drive Benchmark Performance Testing. The research and discussion that went into producing that article changed the way we now test SSD products. Our previous perceptions of this technology were lost on one particular difference: the wear leveling algorithm that makes data a moving target. Without conclusive linear bandwidth testing or some other method of total-capacity testing, our previous performance results were rough estimates at best.
Our test results were obtained after each SSD had been prepared using DISKPART or Sanitary Erase tools. As a word of caution, applications such as these offer immediate but temporary restoration of original ‘pristine’ performance levels. In our tests, we discovered that the maximum performance results (charted) would decay as subsequent tests were performed. SSDs attached to TRIM enabled Operating Systems will benefit from continuously refreshed performance, whereas older O/S’s will require a garbage collection (GC) tool to avoid ‘dirty NAND’ performance degradation.
It’s critically important to understand that no software for the Microsoft Windows platform can accurately measure SSD performance in a comparable fashion. Synthetic benchmark tools such as ATTO Disk Benchmark and Iometer are helpful indicators, but should not be considered the ultimate determining factor. That factor should be measured in actual user experience of real-world applications. Benchmark Reviews includes both bandwidth benchmarks and application speed tests to present a conclusive measurement of product performance.
- Motherboard:ASUS Z270-i STRIX Socket LGA 1151
- Processor: 4.2 GHz Intel Core i7-7700K Kaby Lake CPU
- System Memory: 8GB DDR4 2133MHz
- Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro Creators Update
- AS SSD Benchmark 1.6.4067.34354: Multi-purpose speed and operational performance test
- ATTO Disk Benchmark 2.46: Spot-tests static file size chunks for basic I/O bandwidth
- CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1a by Crystal Dew World: Sequential speed benchmark spot-tests various file size chunks
- Iometer 1.1.0 (built 08-Nov-2010) by Intel Corporation: Tests IOPS performance and I/O response time
- Finalwire AIDA64: Disk Benchmark component tests linear read and write bandwidth speeds
- Futuremark PCMark Vantage: HDD Benchmark Suite tests real-world drive performance
This article utilizes benchmark software tools to produce operational IOPS performance and bandwidth speed results. Each test was conducted in a specific fashion, and repeated for all products. These test results are not comparable to any other benchmark application, neither on this website or another, regardless of similar IOPS or MB/s terminology in the scores. The test results in this project are only intended to be compared to the other test results conducted in identical fashion for this article.
Testing Note on USB 3 ports: When USB 3.0 debuted in 2010, its 5 gigabits per second (5Gb/s) transfer rate was over 10 times faster than USB 2.0’s 480Mb/s. Since then, the USB 3.0 standard has been extended with the USB 3.1 and Type C connector enhancements. To make things even more confusing, there’s USB 3.1 Gen 1 (still at 5Gb/s) and USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10Gb/s).
Without going into too much detail, here are the things to keep in mind:
- USB 3 on a standard USB port (with the blue plastic connector) will always be limited to 5Gb/s
- A USB C port, the small reversible-connector port first seen on Apple’s Macbook and now spreading to notebooks and desktops in the PC world, may be either USB 3.1 Gen 1 (5Gb/s) or USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10Gb/s)
- There is no way to visually distinguish a Gen 1 port from a Gen 2 port; the performance depends on the chipset driving the port. However, computers that implement Gen 2 ports will typically label the port with the official specification of “USB SuperSpeed+”.
Since few computers at the time of this review support the SuperSpeed+ interface and protocol, we’ll normally test USB-C external drives both with a SuperSpeed+ port at 10Gb/s as well as a standard USB 3 port at 5Gb/s.
Alex Schepeljanski of Alex Intelligent Software develops the free AS SSD Benchmark utility for testing storage devices. The AS SSD Benchmark tests sequential read and write speeds, input/output operational performance, and response times.
AS-SSD Benchmark uses compressed data, so sequential file transfer speeds may be reported lower than with other tools using uncompressed data. For this reason, we will concentrate on the operational IOPS performance in this section.
Beginning with sequential transfer performance, the HP EX900 solid state drive produced 1901MB/s for sequential reads and 1544MB/s for sequential writes. The 4K-64 thread test we concentrate on in this benchmark produced 899MB/s reads and 934MB/s writes.
The chart below summarizes AS-SSD 64-thread 4KB performance results among a variety of enthusiast-level SSDs. HP’s new SSD EX900 drive turned in a stellar read score surpassed only by the much more expensive Samsung 960 PRO, and a very good write score.
In the next section, Benchmark Reviews tests transfer rates using ATTO Disk Benchmark.
The ATTO Disk Benchmark program is free, and offers a comprehensive set of test variables to work with. In terms of disk performance, it measures interface transfer rates at various intervals for a user-specified length and then reports read and write speeds for these spot-tests. There are some minor improvements made to the 2.46 version of the program that allow for test lengths up to 2GB, but all of our benchmarks are conducted with 256MB total length. ATTO Disk Benchmark requires that an active partition be set on the drive being tested. Please consider the results displayed by this benchmark to be basic bandwidth speed performance indicators.
Write speeds top out at a 32K block size, while reads increase up to 128K.
The HP NVME EX900 returns excellent scores in this test.
In the next section, Benchmark Reviews tests sequential performance using the CrystalDiskMark 3.0 software tool…
CrystalDiskMark 3.0 is a file transfer and operational bandwidth benchmark tool from Crystal Dew World that offers performance transfer speed results using sequential, 512KB random, and 4KB random samples. For our test results chart below, the 4KB 32-Queue Depth read and write performance was measured using a 1000MB space. CrystalDiskMark requires that an active partition be set on the drive being tested, and all drives are formatted with NTFS on the Intel P67 chipset configured to use AHCI-mode. Benchmark Reviews uses CrystalDiskMark to illustrate operational IOPS performance with multiple threads. In addition to our other tests, this benchmark allows us to determine operational bandwidth under heavy load.
CrystalDiskMark uses compressed data, so sequential file transfer speeds are reported lower than with other tools using uncompressed data. For this reason, we will concentrate on the operational IOPS performance in this section.
CrystalDiskMark 3.0 reports sequential speeds reaching 2070MB/s reads and 1657MB/s writes. Both of these scores are vey good, among the top tier of consumer NVME drives.
Once we start queueing up requests, though, both read and write performance drop markedly. Still, they’re within spitting distance of the Samsung 960 PRO.
In the next section, we continue our testing using Iometer to measure input/output performance…
Iometer is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems. Iometer does for a computer’s I/O subsystem what a dynamometer does for an engine: it measures performance under a controlled load. Iometer was originally developed by the Intel Corporation and formerly known as “Galileo”. Intel has discontinued work on Iometer, and has gifted it to the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL). There is currently a new version of Iometer in beta form, which adds several new test dimensions for SSDs.
Iometer is both a workload generator (that is, it performs I/O operations in order to stress the system) and a measurement tool (that is, it examines and records the performance of its I/O operations and their impact on the system). It can be configured to emulate the disk or network I/O load of any program or benchmark, or can be used to generate entirely synthetic I/O loads. It can generate and measure loads on single or multiple (networked) systems.
To measure random I/O response time as well as total I/O’s per second, Iometer is set to use 4KB file size chunks over a 100% random sequential distribution at a queue depth of 32 outstanding I/O’s per target. The tests are given a 50% read and 50% write distribution. While this pattern may not match traditional ‘server’ or ‘workstation’ profiles, it illustrates a single point of reference relative to our product field.
All of our SSD tests used Iometer 1.1.0 (build 08-Nov-2010) by Intel Corporation to measure IOPS performance. Iometer is configured to use 32 outstanding I/O’s per target and random 50/50 read/write distribution configuration: 4KB 100 Random 50-50 Read and Write.icf. The chart below illustrates combined random read and write IOPS over a 120-second Iometer test phase, where highest I/O total is preferred.
The EX900 really falls down on our custom IOMeter workload, turning in scores below many older SATA SSDs. This was consistent across several additional runs of this benchmark.
In our next section, we test linear read and write bandwidth performance and compare the speed of the ADATA Gammix against several other top storage products using the AIDA64 Disk Benchmark.
Many enthusiasts are familiar with the Finalwire AIDA64 benchmark suite, but very few are aware of the Disk Benchmark tool available inside the program. The AIDA64 Disk Benchmark performs linear read and write bandwidth tests on each drive, and can be configured to use file chunk sizes up to 1MB (which speeds up testing and minimizes jitter in the waveform). Because of the full sector-by-sector nature of linear testing, Benchmark Reviews endorses this method for testing SSD products, as detailed in our Solid State Drive Benchmark Performance Testing article. One of the advantages SSDs have over traditional spinning-platter hard disks is much more consistent bandwidth: hard disk bandwidth drops off as the capacity draws linear read/write speed down into the inner-portion of the disk platter. AIDA64 Disk Benchmark does not require a partition to be present for testing, so all of our benchmarks are completed prior to drive formatting.
Linear disk benchmarks are superior bandwidth speed tools because they scan from the first physical sector to the last. A side affect of many linear write-performance test tools is that the data is erased as it writes to every sector on the drive. Normally this isn’t an issue, but it has been shown that partition table alignment will occasionally play a role in overall SSD performance (HDDs don’t suffer this problem).
After a somewhat spotty start, the EX900 surges forward with an amazing average linear read speed of just under 3 gigabytes per second, handily beating HP’s claimed 2.1 GB/s sustained write claim.
AIDA64 linear write-to tests were next…
The inability to sustain high linear write speeds is common among budget SSDs, and these results require some interpretation. The very high throughput for the first 60-70 gigabytes is really what most users will see in normal use, unless they’re copying hundreds of gigabytes of files. The average speed beyond that point fluctuates around 200MB/s.
So in pure linear reads across the entire SSD, the EX900’s performance is the best we’ve ever seen for any single storage device ever, while pure linear writes…well…they’re reasonable for a SATA SSD, but poor for an NVME drive.
In the next section we use PCMark Vantage to test real-world performance…
PCMark Vantage is an objective hardware performance benchmark tool for PCs running 32- and 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows 7. PCMark Vantage is well suited for benchmarking any type of Microsoft Windows 7 PC: from multimedia home entertainment systems and laptops, to dedicated workstations and high-end gaming rigs. Benchmark Reviews has decided to use the HDD Test Suite to demonstrate simulated real-world storage drive performance in this article.
PCMark Vantage runs eight different storage benchmarks, each with a specific purpose. Once testing is complete, results are given a PCMark score while and detailed results indicate actual transaction speeds.
The HP SSD EX900 surprised me by turning in the highest PCMark Vantage score we’ve ever seen…and by a significant margin!
In the next section, I’ll present my final thoughts and conclusion.
IMPORTANT: Although the rating and final score mentioned in this conclusion are made to be as objective as possible, please be advised that every author perceives these factors differently at various points in time. While we each do our best to ensure that all aspects of the product are considered, there are often times unforeseen market conditions and manufacturer changes which occur after publication that could render our rating obsolete. Please do not base any purchase solely on our conclusion, as it represents our product rating specifically for the product tested which may differ from future versions.
The Hewlett-Packard SSD EX900 is HP’s budget m.2 SSD offering, and it shows in the relatively poor sustained write and IOPS scores. However, these performance weaknesses will make little real-world difference for most users. For example, here’s the performance I recorded for a 5 gigabyte file copy, done by simply dragging a Blu Ray rip of “Spider-Man 3” to the EX900. At 837 megabytes per second, the entire copy took just a hair over 6 seconds. Judging from the AIDA64 linear write test, I’d expect this level of performance to be maintained through file copies more than 10 times this size, and perhaps longer, since Windows Explorer-level file copies are less “intensive” than AIDA64’s hardcoded writes.
And while the IOPS scores in our 4K/QD32 50/50 read/write test were very low for any SSD, let alone an NVME drive, I call your attention to the PCMark Vantage scores, which are the highest Benchmark Reviews has ever recorded, and the AIDA64 linear read score, which is also the highest we’ve ever recorded (for a non-RAID device). While IOPS and linear write scores are important, remember that linear read and Vantage scores are much more relevant to typical consumer workloads.
HP is introducing the EX900 (and higher-spec EX920) drives in April. The MSRP for our 500GB review unit is $179.99, which is similar to the price of other TLC NAND mid-tier devices such as the Samsung 850/860 EVO; however, the EX900’s 3-year warranty comes in below the Samsung’s 5-year warranty. For consumers, this may not mean much as the m.2 NVME drive market is changing so rapidly that anything you buy now will be completely obsolete by the time the warranty runs out. Also, HP includes no utility software like Samsung’s “Magician” utility. Still, the exceptional overall performance of the Hewlett-Packard EX900 make it an option worth your serious consideration.
+ Exceptional overall performance
+ Competitive pricing
– No included utility software
– Low sustained write and IOPS performance
– Only a 3-year warranty
- Performance: 9.00
- Appearance: 8.50
- Construction: 9.50
- Functionality: 8.00
- Value: 9.00
