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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blahsaysblah - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
Anyone see the size of the S700 and think a new plug-in format for SSDs is in order. Been wishing for vertical M.2. ports since they launched. 2280 is definitely shorter than any standard video card and 2242 would be easy to engineer so it cant be snapped off easily/accidentally.Just a row of SATA M.2 cards lined up not too close to video card. Or, six M.2 ports to replace the SATA ports normally on a board. Wish cables would go away sooner.
romrunning - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link
Sure, look at the U.2 connector. More enterprise use right now, but it's on some consumer boards as well. It can connect PCIe NVMe drives.blahsaysblah - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link
Way too big. I dont understand why m.2 cant be made vertical, especially for a 2242 or 2230 sized card.Just plug in cards like DIMMs,...though i checked, they are only around 30-32mm high.
No more cables, just plug the storage directly into motherboard.
Space Jam - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
>While the HP S700 and S700 Pro are not currently priced competitively, they do show that there's value in continued firmware tuning. More than a year after Micron's 32-layer 3D NAND hit the market, the HP S700 sets a new record for sequential read performance from a four-channel controller, and helps show that DRAMless SSDs can't be immediately dismissed from consideration.With the pricing being what it is this SSD is laughable. For me this is kind of a deathnail for the idea of DRAMless SSDs as it's not cheaper, which is the whole reason for sacrificing DRAM and stomaching a substantial performance differential. And its DRAM posting Pro-variant manages to tango with the better drives...by being significantly more expensive with a meager warranty; albeit with fairly generous write endurance ratings...not that that matters with performance dropping like a rock on both S700 and S700 Pro as it reaches full.
The best I can say about the drive is that it isn't a HDD.
RaistlinZ - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
Sorry Billy Tallis, but there's no reason to buy either of these SSD's. They cost MORE and perform WORSE than drives that have been out for a few years now.StrangerGuy - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link
If could be that the only purpose of your massive failure of your product is to serve as a warning to others.lilmoe - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link
This is where i would normally complain that this is worthless and meaningless in the presence of the 850 evo. But this coming from hp might serve as a warning for ssd oems TO DROP THE DAMN PROCESS. I seriously hope that's the case, and i seriously hope other pc oems follow.As bad a this ssd looks, it would be a huge upgrade for anyone buying a laptop in the $400-600 range.
lilmoe - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link
*PRICESSanX - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link
Only high tech resellers salespeople here? In two decades I've never heard a word anyone discussed the manufacturing cost of anything at politically correct Anandtech and how rigged the component pricing is. Good example: manufacturing cost of flash was $1/GB in 2009. You will see true manufacturing cost only in the peaks of recessions. And now look at current $0.5/GB. Just factor of 2 progress in 8 years?... rotflATC9001 - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link
Can't hold a candle to the 850 Evo that's...3 years old now? And is more expensive...*Yawn* next.