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 - 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.
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DigitalFreak - Monday, July 9, 2018 - link
Too bad NVMe drives still have a price premium over SATA, but at least we're starting to get good performing drives without the ridiculous Samsung markup.bubblyboo - Tuesday, July 10, 2018 - link
I mean I just got a 512GB 970 Pro for <$200 but sure Samsung has a "ridiculous markup".grahad - Tuesday, July 10, 2018 - link
Sales don't really count. It's 229.99 on Amazon and Newegg at the moment.bubblyboo - Tuesday, July 10, 2018 - link
That's still not much since it's just about the only consumer 3D MLC NVME drive.Hectandan - Thursday, July 12, 2018 - link
There are still few SSDs besides Samsung with consistent performance under heavy workload, and I don't know why one needs NVMe at all if not for some kind of workload.shabby - Monday, July 9, 2018 - link
Can you guys start separating tests based on ssd sizes? Seeing a 1tb ssd benched against one half its size or even a quarter somewhat isn't fair.Billy Tallis - Monday, July 9, 2018 - link
The drives in this review that aren't 1TB are either representing controller+NAND combinations that I don't have a 1TB drive for, or are there to show how the same controller+NAND combination as the drive being reviewed scales with capacity.milkod2001 - Monday, July 9, 2018 - link
Would be nice if prices came down so this would be more popular and they would sell more. I mean 1TB m2 SSD under $100 would be nice. I doesn't cost them more than 20 bucks to make one anyway.mkaibear - Monday, July 9, 2018 - link
What's your source on that bill of materials? It sounds distinctly fishy to meRickyBaby - Monday, July 9, 2018 - link
Bought this drive off an Ebay store for $230 - on sale + 15% coupon and got it Friday. Installed in an Asrock Z97 mobo with an adapter card - thanks to Asrock for adding the pcie boot option to the bios awhile back. Did a fresh install of Win10 ... didn't want to disk clone and bring forward all the crap. Haven't done much with it yet ... it does boot very fast ! Ran a few benchies. Crystal Diskmark shows a 2,900 read and 1,700 write score for the Q32TI Seq speed ... not bad for an aging system !