The HP S700 And S700 Pro SSD Review
by Billy Tallis on September 7, 2017 9:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.
On our lightest ATSB test, the average data rate scores are not as widely variable and higher capacity doesn't always translate to a clearly higher score. The empty-drive performance of the HP S700 is slower than everything else regardless of capacity, but not by a huge margin. When the drives are full, the HP S700's performance drops precipitously, but the 512GB HP S700 Pro retains more performance than even Crucial's drives.
None of these drives has a problem with average latency when the Light test is run on an empty drive. The ADATA SU800, HP S700 and the smaller two capacities of the S700 Pro show much higher average latency when full, but on a test this light the worst scores are still in the low millisecond range. The 99th percentile latency scores paint a similar picture of all the drives being fine until they're full, and the 512GB S700 Pro handles being full quite well.
The 120GB S700 is the only drive in this bunch where average read latency exceeds 1ms when the test is run on a full drive. Average write latencies can climb to over 1ms for several drives, and the 120GB S700 breaks 5ms in the worst-case conditions for the Light test.
The 99th percentile read and write latencies are all in the low-millisecond range when the Light test is run on an empty drive. With the drives full, the worst case is again the 120GB S700, with thirty times higher 99th percentile write latency. But since this is still only 100ms, even this slowest drive doesn't produce noticeable pauses during ordinary use for light workloads.
All three HP S700s top the energy efficiency charts, and the S700 Pros aren't far behind. Energy efficiency is worse when the test is run on a full drive, but the result is that the S700 Pro ends up at the top instead of the S700. Before TLC NAND took over the mainstream SSD market, Silicon Motion's controllers were known for great efficiency. HP's drives show off Silicon Motion's efficiency much better than the ADATA SU800 did.
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sonny73n - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link
You should compare the 850 EVO with the BX300. I don't care whether the EVO has better controller but I will take a 2-bit per cell NAND over a 3-bit any day.mapesdhs - Wednesday, September 13, 2017 - link
I just keep picking up lightly used 840 Pro 256GB units, people have forgotten how good they were and still are. It's annoying they no longer appear in review charts. Even the Vertex4 and Vector are still good compared to modern models.barleyguy - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link
You seem to be comparing retail price to street price. HP has sales almost constantly. These might be $116 initially, but they'll be discounted very quickly to lower prices. I fully expect them to be competitive pricewise.r3loaded - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
Hurray, yet another 2017 SSD that gets utterly curbstomped by a Samsung SSD from 2015 on both performance and price.8steve8 - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
1. Who is buying SATA SSDs in 20172. Why is Anandtech putting so much effort into SATA SSDs in 2017
Billy Tallis - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
I've yet to hear from a vendor that their volume of NVMe drives has even come close to matching their volume of SATA drives, for either the retail consumer market or the client OEM market. Even in the enterprise market, NVMe isn't close to killing off SATA and SAS yet.We have new technologies launching in SATA products like the Intel 545s and Western Digital's 3D NAND SSDs. SATA SSDs are still more cost effective than NVMe SSDs, and will be until there have been plenty of low-end NVMe controllers like Phison E8 and Silicon Motion SM2263 on the market for quite a while.
Elstar - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
Also:1) most motherboards are still loaded with SATA connectors
2) most motherboards have few if any NVMe connectors (other than traditional PCIe)
3) SATA drives are often more friendly to "sneaker net" security.
8steve8 - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
yes, most motherboards have lots of SATA, but they also have a PCIe m.2 slot... hard to find one that doesn't.but who's buying SATA SSDs? It's an honest question.
on newegg i see a $99 240GB m.2 NVMe SSD, so who would recommend this 256GB SATA drive with a retail price of $169?
bji - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link
Nice straw man. Answer: nobody would buy either. They'd buy a $90 250GB Samsung EVO. I just did last night.cfenton - Monday, September 11, 2017 - link
Lot's of people don't have motherboards that support m.2. You're right that most new motherboards support m.2, but there are a whole lot of people out there with 2+ year old computers who might want more storage or a faster boot drive. SSDs, of any kind, still aren't common in many OEM products, especially at the low end. A SATA SSD is still going to beat the hell out of any HDD.