The HP S700 And S700 Pro SSD Review
by Billy Tallis on September 7, 2017 9:00 AM ESTRandom Read Performance
Our first test of random read performance uses very short bursts of operations issued one at a time with no queuing. The drives are given enough idle time between bursts to yield an overall duty cycle of 20%, so thermal throttling is impossible. Each burst consists of a total of 32MB of 4kB random reads, from a 16GB span of the disk. The total data read is 1GB.
The HP S700 Pro's QD1 burst random read performance is a bit slower than the ADATA SU800 except for the 128GB capacity, but overall the scores are fine for a budget SSD. The S700s all perform similarly and slightly ahead of Toshiba's OCZ VX500 (DRAMless with MLC) and the 128GB SU800.
Our sustained random read performance is similar to the random read test from our 2015 test suite: queue depths from 1 to 32 are tested, and the average performance and power efficiency across QD1, QD2 and QD4 are reported as the primary scores. Each queue depth is tested for one minute or 32GB of data transferred, whichever is shorter. After each queue depth is tested, the drive is given up to one minute to cool off so that the higher queue depths are unlikely to be affected by accumulated heat build-up. The individual read operations are again 4kB, and cover a 64GB span of the drive.
On a longer test and with some higher queue depths, the HP S700 falls to last place, as expected of a DRAMless SSD. The larger two S700 Pros again come in just behind the SU800, while the 128GB S700 Pro beats the SU800 but doesn't match the planar TLC based PNY CS1311.
The power efficiency of the S700 is poor but they're not alone at the bottom of the chart. The larger two S700 Pros are about average.
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The 120/128GB HP drives saturate around QD8, while the 250/256GB HPs show a little bit of performance improvement beyond QD16 and the 500/512GB HPs are still scaling up at the QD32 limit imposed by the SATA link. Unfortunately, none of them come close to the SATA throughput limit even at QD32.
Random Write Performance
Our test of random write burst performance is structured similarly to the random read burst test, but each burst is only 4MB and the total test length is 128MB. The 4kB random write operations are distributed over a 16GB span of the drive, and the operations are issued one at a time with no queuing.
The burst random write performance of the HP S700 Pro is above average at all capacities. The S700 is slowest, but even the 120GB is still more than half as fast as the fastest drive in this bunch.
As with the sustained random read test, our sustained 4kB random write test runs for up to one minute or 32GB per queue depth, covering a 64GB span of the drive and giving the drive up to 1 minute of idle time between queue depths to allow for write caches to be flushed and for the drive to cool down.
On the longer random write test, the larger two HP S700 Pros maintain average performance while the smallest is at quite a disadvantage, but it's still faster than any other recent 128GB-class SATA SSD. (The 128GB Samsung 850 PRO is very fast, but was discontinued when Samsung migrated to 48-layer 3D NAND.) The 120GB S700 is extremely slow on this sustained test.
The larger two S700 Pros that offer decent performance also offer great power efficiency, and the smallest S700 Pro is great for its capacity class. The larger two S700s beat the planar TLC drive on efficiency but are otherwise unimpressive, and the 120GB S700's efficiency is little more than a tenth of the best SATA SSDs.
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The 512GB S700 Pro's performance scales well from QD1 to QD4, then increases slowly through the rest of the test. The smaller capacities hit the limits of their SLC caches before the end of the test and performance gets much lower and less consistent. The S700s are slow and inefficient throughout the test, but do at least offer the lowest power consumption in absolute terms, hovering just above 1W.
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sonny73n - Saturday, September 9, 2017 - link
I understand that but where it'll lead us to? Most of things cost much more in the US compared to the same in China - from gasoline to food. A Chinese can cover his living expenses with just $1000/month while it takes at least twice that much for an American. Keep on rising the minimum wage will not solve the problem because we will be left with nothing to produce. Something's really messed up here.demMind - Monday, September 11, 2017 - link
sonny.. US Companies can afford to pay wages in the US. They just don't want to because executives love their year-over-year bonuses and dividends to grow. So no, prices haven't gone up because of cost of labor, they've gone up because each of us wants as much as we can get for as little extra effort as possible.Fujikoma - Thursday, September 14, 2017 - link
The price wouldn't be that much more. That extra labor savings is balanced by less efficient use of labor, material waste, shipping costs, increased counterfeit products, higher CEO pay and stock payouts if they exist (Apple is a good one for this). When companies moved to China, they did not lower their prices from cheaper labor. They lined their pockets with the extra cash. I worked for over a decade with a major electronics manufacturer invested heavily in China. Nothing but a headache for such a slim margin. That was with a 50X price margin on one of their highest volume products compared to a 12X price margin with the Mexican produced product (selling price relative to claimed materials + labor + storage + packaging + advertising + everything else involved). The higher margin is offset by shipping, defective/poorly made product, counterfeit product and material waste from poor manufacturing setup.As to the cheaper labor, that's because the U.S. allows product made from next to slave labor AND product made in environmentally damaging conditions to be imported into this country. Why do you think China has a pollution problem (aside from coal)... less regulation compared to Europe, Canada, Japan and the U.S.
Samus - Tuesday, December 26, 2017 - link
Sonny, you realize Lenovo lost the crown 2 years ago? They held the #1 spot for 14 quarters. HP has held the #1 spot for 39 quarters since 2006 when they took it from Dell.Nobody is hurt...except the Fortune 500 companies that blindly bought into Lenovo based on price, only to have their IT dept advocate for change almost immediately. Which aligns perfectly with the 3 year corporate product cycle and the amount of time Lenovo held the #1 sales edge in North America.
I'm an IT director, I know first hand the outcry my community had over Lenovo, and not just in relation to superfish.
petar_b - Tuesday, September 12, 2017 - link
I don't stand any of these big players HP, Lenovo.... It's all rip off, Lenovo's licensing is too complicated (can't activate features you paid for on hardware that they consider obsolete) and then on HP side plenty of similar crap. You almost feel bad for asking for something you own/deserve/paid.... I love SunMicro, chenbro, clean LSI or Adaptec works with everything. What HP SSD, that one will be backed by warranty only if attached to their mobo, or whatever other stupidity...Flunk - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
Marketing terms are always meaningless without context. You always need to read the specs behind the glossy advertising to know what you're buying. I don't see that changing any time soon.MajGenRelativity - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
AgreedyankeeDDL - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
I'm shocked by the price. Dramless, with those specs, should be $70, top, for the 240GB.Why in the world would I spend no less than $116, when the EVO sells for $90?!?!?!
Glock24 - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
Just what I was thinking. Pricing on these are ridiculous. They have a bit more storage size, but so does the Crucial MX300 and it's also way cheaper and faster!Samus - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
The MX300 is pretty much the only economy drive to consider outside of an 850 EVO IMHO. Even if these sell for half the retail price, they aren't worth it. You can just pickup an old M500 on eBay (or even an OEM Intel 520/530) for half these prices and have similar performance.