The HP S700 And S700 Pro SSD Review
by Billy Tallis on September 7, 2017 9:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The different classes of SSD can be identified by how much slower they perform when full compared to their fresh out of the box state. On the Heavy test, the HP S700 and S700 Pro tend to deliver average data rates that are close to the mid-range and high-end SATA SSDs when the test is run on an empty drive. When the test is run on a full drive, the best SSDs are only slowed by a few percent, while the DRAMless HP S700's average data rate can drop to a quarter of its other score. The S700 Pro doesn't suffer as badly, and its full-drive performance penalty is much less severe than what the ADATA SU800 suffers from, even when the peak performance of the S700 Pro is lower.
The average and 99th percentile latency scores make the full vs. empty performance differences even clearer. The S700 Pro's average latency is two to three times higher when full, and the S700's average latency can be over seven times higher when full. The differences are larger when considering 99th percentile latencies. The worst of these latency scores are well above the seek times of a mechanical hard drive, though overall performance is still far better than a hard drive can offer on a test with such a high average queue depth (by client workload standards). The 120GB HP S700 is the only HP drive that shows particularly poor latency compared to the competitors when the test is run on an empty drive.
Average read latencies don't vary much among SATA drives when the Heavy test is run on an empty drive; only the 120GB-class drives are significantly slower than par. When the test is run on a full drive, read latencies are merely doubled in even the most strongly affected drives. On the write side, the 120GB-class drives have much higher latency than the rest even when the test is run on an empty drive. The HPs and the ADATA SU800 are the drives that show the most severe impact from the drive being full, with the HP S700 being affected the most and the S700 Pro being less affected than the ADATA SU800.
The rankings for 99th percentile read and write latencies are similar to the average latency rankings. The 120/128GB drives are substantially slower than the larger drives, where even the DRAMless HP S700 offers reasonable performance provided it isn't full.
The larger two capacities of the HP S700 take the lead for energy efficiency when the Heavy test is run on an empty drive, and even when full they don't use significantly more energy than the Samsung 850 PRO. The 512GB HP S700 Pro also scores quite well in both scenarios, with energy usage only slightly higher than the Crucial MX300. In all cases, both HP models offer clearly better energy efficiency than the ADATA SU800.
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ddriver - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
1.1 - SATA is OK for most tasks, there will be no perceivable difference to a NVME. Besides some NVME drives are almost as slow as SATA drives, such as the p600.1.2 - most boards come with a single M2, those that have more are very expensive, and require expensive CPUs to get actual PCIE lanes
2 - because HP is paying
ddriver - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
Even the most expensive mobos have at most 3 m2 slots, so if you want more than 3 SSDs, what do you do then? In contrast, even low end mobos come with at least 4 SATA ports.You can get some very decent speed from SSDs in raid 0, on top of the higher capacity, SATA ssds go as high as 4TB, m2 cap out at 2TB.
8steve8 - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
sure, but do you think most people who can't afford a higher end motherboard are buying more than one SSD for their system?ddriver - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link
It depends on what you need. You can save plenty on money on mobo and cpu and spend on much affordable sata ssds. Just because you may need to spend 1000$ on storage doesn't mean you have to be forced to spend another 1000 on cpu and mobo.A 2 TB evo will cost you 700$, the cheapest and "onlinest" 2TB m2 drive is 1200$ - over 70% more expensive. The mx300 is even cheaper - you can have a full 4 TB for less than 1200$.
yankeeDDL - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
Loads of people. I have 3 SATA SSD on my PC and 2 laptops.M.2 is still much pricier, so only premium laptop use them, and I find it easier to buy a laptop with a regular HDD, and upgrade it to the SSD of my liking and size. SSD still carry a huge markup on many laptops, and in many cases you cannot even select one which is bigger than 128GB, which is preposterous.
sonny73n - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link
I am still buying SATA SSDs for my OCed Sandy Bridge system. Have 3 SSDs in there but I'm considering a big one for storage.evilspoons - Sunday, September 10, 2017 - link
Yep, I've got a friggin GTX 1080 in my i7-2600k and a random collection of hard drives and SSDs populating pretty much every SATA port on my ASUS P8Z68-V PRO. M.2? Neato, but... what's that? Lol.Up next, I would not mind a nice ol' 2 TB SSD to put the majority of my Steam games on, but I really don't have $1400 CAD to special order an 850 Pro (or Evo). Both of which are SATA, good luck with anything over M.2... I think the 960 Pro is like $1700 CAD?
mapesdhs - Wednesday, September 13, 2017 - link
To the both of you, just use an SM951 or SM961 on a PCIe adapter card. I get very good results with either model on my ASUS M4E, am about to move my main photo/video archive from a 500GB 850 EVO onto a 512GB SM961. I'm getting around 2GB/sec with the SM951, 3GB/sec with the SM961, and even more with SB-E mbds (3.5GB/sec on an R4E). In the UK where I am, the Akasa PCIe adapter card is only about 13 UKP, so the total cost is still less than mainstream SATA SSDs, though I did manage to get a 960 Pro 512GB for a good price for my R4E gaming setup.Also, the 950 Pro has its own boot ROM, so on older mbds you can use it as a boot drive via legacy BIOS settings. I know someone who's done this with their X79 and I plan on doing it with my own setups. Alas the 960 Pro does not have its own boot ROM so it can't be used in the same way by default. Other NVMe models also have their own boot ROM though, such as the Intel 750.
Also, for ASUS X79 systems, there's a thread on the ROG site where a guy is posting modded BIOS files to allow various ASUS mbds to boot from any NVMe SSD, not just units like the 950 Pro. Thus, I plan on replacing my R4E's 850 Pro with a 960 Pro which was originally going to be just for game data alone.
There's still plenty of life left in older mbds, much to the annoyance I'm sure of Intel and other vendors. :D Beats me though why Samsung didn't include a boot ROM in the 960, that was bizarre.
PM/email me if you'd like screen captures of these SSDs being tested on various configs (so far mostly an M4E, R4E ans P9X79-E WS), ie. AS-SSD, CDM and Atto.
Ian.
mapesdhs - Wednesday, September 13, 2017 - link
Forgot to mention, I also plan on testing them with some P55 and X58 mbds, should be interesting, and perhaps a Striker II Extreme aswell if I have the time. Might try a couple of older AMD boards aswell, I have a few.FunBunny2 - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link
-- Who is buying SATA SSDs in 2017most computers, modulo gamers and stats and RDBMS, don't do much more than e-mail and web surfing. the home PC reached good enough a decade ago. swapping spinning rust for just about any NAND device gets you as much improvement as a new i7 machine. I guess the idle rich would choose the latter, but the rest of us just get a SSD.