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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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.