The HP S700 And S700 Pro SSD Review
by Billy Tallis on September 7, 2017 9:00 AM ESTPower Management
Real-world client storage workloads leave SSDs idle most of the time, so the active power measurements presented earlier in this review only account for a small part of what determines a drive's suitability for battery-powered use. Especially under light use, the power efficiency of a SSD is determined mostly be how well it can save power when idle.
SATA SSDs are tested with SATA link power management disabled to measure their active idle power draw, and with it enabled for the deeper idle power consumption score and the idle wake-up latency test. Our testbed, like any ordinary desktop system, cannot trigger the deepest DevSleep idle state.
Idle power management for NVMe SSDs is far more complicated than for SATA SSDs. NVMe SSDs can support several different idle power states, and through the Autonomous Power State Transition (APST) feature the operating system can set a drive's policy for when to drop down to a lower power state. There is typically a tradeoff in that lower-power states take longer to enter and wake up from, so the choice about what power states to use may differ for desktop and notebooks.
Active idle is representative of a typical desktop, where none of the advanced PCIe or SATA link or NVMe power saving features are enabled and the drive is immediately ready to process new commands. The idle power consumption metric is measured with PCIe Active State Power Management L1.2 state and SATA Device-Initiated Power Management enabled and NVMe APST enabled.
Drive capacity has little effect on idle power consumption. Active idle power draw comes down mostly to the choice of controller. The Phison S10 is the best, followed by Samsung's SSDs and then the HP S700 with the SM2258XT. The S700 Pro with its DRAM more than 100mW extra at idle.
With link power management enabled, the S700 Pro has good power savings but doesn't stand out from the crowd. The S700 apparently fails to engage the slumber power state and thus power doesn't go down at all. This makes the S700 a poor choice for mobile use, but this may simply be a firmware bug that could be fixed.
The idle wake-up latency of the S700 is minimal, since it never actually enters a low-power state. The Phison S10 drives are by far the fastest to wake up from the slumber state, and the S700 Pro falls in the second tier of drives that wake up in less than 1ms.
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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.