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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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.