The HP EX920 M.2 SSD Review: Finding the Mainstream Sweet Spot

AnandTech 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.

The average data rates from the HP EX920 on the Light test aren't particularly impressive, with most high-end NVMe SSDs turning in higher scores. But the EX920 doesn't fall behind by enough to worry about-it's still several times faster than SATA drives, and close enough to the fastest drives that the difference isn't noticeable during ordinary usage.

The average and 99th percentile latency scores from the HP EX920 on the Light test aren't the best, but they're definitely good enough. Even the full-drive latency is not a problem, unlike for the smaller Intel 760p or 600p.

Average read and write latencies from the HP EX920 are good, especially when the test is run on a full drive. Both latency measurements stay at just a fraction of the latency of the Crucial MX500 SATA SSD.

The 99th percentile read and write latency scores from the HP EX920 are great, especially for the full-drive test run where the EX920 keeps tighter control on read latencies than any other flash-based SSD we've tested.

On the Light test, the HP EX920 doesn't fall quite as clearly into the power-hungry club. Its total energy usage on the Light test is still a bit above average, especially for the full-drive test run, but it is clearly using less energy than the M9Pe or 970 EVO.