The HP EX920 M.2 SSD Review: Finding the Mainstream Sweet Spot
by Billy Tallis on July 9, 2018 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.
When the ATSB Heavy test is run on a freshly-erased HP EX920, the average data rate is as high as we've seen from a flash-based SSD. However, the drive seems to be relying on aggressive SLC caching to achieve this stellar performance, because when the test is run on a full drive, the average data rate drops by almost half, leaving the EX920 with slightly sub-par full-drive performance.
The average and 99th percentile latency from the HP EX920 is top-notch when the Heavy test is run on an empty drive, but both latency figures roughly double when the test is run on a full drive. This leaves the EX920 as one of the slower drives in the high-end NVMe category.
On The Destroyer, the HP EX920's average read latency was twice that of the other high-end NVMe SSDs. Here on the Heavy test, the EX920 is quite competitive, though there's still a fairly large difference between the empty and full drive performance. The average write latency from the EX920 isn't as impressive even when the test is run on an empty drive, but it's still good, and much better than the low-end NVMe SSDs and SATA SSDs.
The 99th percentile read latency of the HP EX920 on the Heavy test is great. Even on the much slower full-drive test run, the EX920 manages to control read latency better than Samsung's SSDs. The situation is quite different for 99th percentile write latency: when the test is run on an empty drive, the EX920 performs on par with other high-end NVMe SSDs, but when the drive is full the EX920 offers worse QoS than some low-end NVMe SSDs and our comparison SATA drive.
As with The Destroyer, the HP EX920's energy usage on the Heavy test puts it in the more power-hungry tier of NVMe SSDs, but this time it has the performance to match, and the overall spread among M.2 NVMe SSDs isn't as broad.
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DanNeely - Monday, July 9, 2018 - link
The same ignorant rage about SSD costs that the clueless have been spouting for the last decade.0ldman79 - Monday, July 9, 2018 - link
The numbers can all be skewed if you change how you measure them.How much does 1 gram of sand cost? A bit of PCB? Copper tracings?
Gotta ignore the labor, R&D, foundries, etc...
That's like the genius fixing the giant machine for $2,000. Itemized invoice, $2 for turning the screw, $1998 for knowing which screw to turn.
philehidiot - Monday, July 9, 2018 - link
That's my job. It's easy but requires skills and knowledge.But they pay me bugger all.
Cliff34 - Monday, July 9, 2018 - link
They don't want to drop the price more because it will eat into their margin.That's how the ssd market is. Your lowest is the sata. With nvmd, it is a higher price points (same spec).
Of course they can drop the price, but why would they do that when they can make more per unit knowing that many people who buy nvm often don't have a choice for sata.
ATC9001 - Wednesday, July 11, 2018 - link
Exactly....I mean who wouldn't want to get a lot more performance for the same price as a consumer? If they stopped charging premiums there wouldnt be any money left over for R&D for what comes after nvm. Also, if you can afford these large SSD's I really don;t wanna hear whining about the price....talk about a first world problem.MrSpadge - Monday, July 9, 2018 - link
http://www.insye.com/DP/NANDFlashSpotPrice.aspxEven with 512 Gbit TLC chips (best price per capacity, slowest) the NAND alone will currently cost 9$/chip, i.e. 144$. And you need a bit more than that to build a SSD.
Samus - Monday, July 9, 2018 - link
$20 bucks LOL. Controllers alone cost nearly that!FullmetalTitan - Thursday, July 12, 2018 - link
The memory controller alone probably wholesales for ~$12-18, so I don't know where you are getting those numbers.Death666Angel - Monday, July 9, 2018 - link
"the flip side is that its pricing is noticeably lower than the flagships from more established SSD brands like Samsung and Western Digital." Unfortunately not true in Germany. :( Doesn't seem to be fully released here, 3 retailers offer it, but those 3 are large ones.Vanguarde - Monday, July 9, 2018 - link
These will sell like hot cakes if they put the 1TB out for $39.99