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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olderkid - Monday, July 9, 2018 - link
When is the last time you bought a hot cake?SanX - Monday, July 9, 2018 - link
Who here remembers two decades ago history when DRAM prices dropped 5-6 times in a matter of few months and no one got bankrupt?Yes, the electronic industry is screwing people for decades. In the brain of salespeople the 10nm Apple A11 4.3 billion transistor chip can cost $25 but similar transistor count some Intel Xeon processor made even by ancient 20-30nm tech by their crazy logic can not cost less then $1000-2000
Adramtech - Tuesday, July 10, 2018 - link
SanX, All these companies from 20 years ago are not in the game because there are not enough profits to go around....and there were many more from this time period that went out of business.Samsung
NEC
Hitachi
Hyundai
Toshiba
LG Semicon
TI
Micron
Mitsubishi
Fujitsu
Adramtech - Tuesday, July 10, 2018 - link
Extra Credit: what companies from this 1990's list make DRAM today?Totally - Tuesday, July 10, 2018 - link
I'll playSamsung
TI <- technically still does since it is partnered with Micron
Micron
Dr. Swag - Tuesday, July 10, 2018 - link
Surprise surprise, cost/transistor went down from 20-30nm to 10nm, and also the xeon has a much bigger die size and so had lower yields.Totally - Tuesday, July 10, 2018 - link
You're speaking words that one doesn't understand.SanX - Tuesday, July 10, 2018 - link
Rotfl rotflnao Swag and Totally. You made my day...how poor anandtech readers degraded so miserably.... Oh, yea, sure, Intel is that dumb company which makes potato chips. It also as a complimentary business makes retarded design processors on older tech because wants more defects on the yield, low margin, and has no brain, no money and no advanced factories. Sure, it can not lower the production cost to $10-20 bucks like all others obviously do.Lololololol. Congrats, you two made the most stupid comment of the year.
Hectandan - Thursday, July 12, 2018 - link
Xeons are likely to cost less than $1K.But production cost is nothing in this industry. R&D, demand, etc almost always drive the prices. Otherwise why are iPhones selling for $1K with a $25 chip?
FullmetalTitan - Thursday, July 12, 2018 - link
Cause Samsung charged them $124 a piece for the OLED display and driver IC assembly for one. That is compared to ~$30 for the LCD displays used in the iPhone 9.