HP EX900 500GB Thousand.two PCIe NVMe SSD Review

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HP Tries To Proceeds Marketplace Share in SSDs

Today, Legit Reviews is taking a expect at the HP SSD EX900 series of M.two PCIe x4 NVMe 1.iii certified SSDs that just happen to exist aimed at entry-level market with capacities of 120GB, 250GB, and 500GB. Bodily street pricing for these iii drives are $59.99, $94.52 and $179.99, respectively. The HP SSD EX900 drive series offers sequential speeds of up to 2100 MB/s read and 1500 MB/due south write. Random 4K performance is also good with upwardly to 120,000 IOPS read and 110,000 IOPS write. To get these speeds the folks at HP went with the Silicon Motion SM2263XT controller and Micron 64-Layer 3D TLC NAND Flash retentivity. Non bad performance for a budget friendly drive with solid performance numbers and using the latest NVMe one.3 protocol.

HP SSD EX900 Retail Packaging

HP SSD EX900 M.2 Series Features:

  • Form Factor: Single-Sided G.2 2280
  • Interface: PCIe Gen 3.0 x4
  • Capacities: 120GB / 250GB / 500GB / 1TB
  • Controller: Silicon Motion SM2263XT HMB
  • NAND: Micron 64-Layer 3D TLC (Second Generation)
  • MTBF: 2,000,000 hours
  • Sequential Read: Up to 1900 MB/due south (120GB), Up to 2100 MB/southward (250/500GB)
  • Sequential Write: Upward to 650 MB/s (120GB), Up to 1300 MB/due south (250GB), Upwards to 1500 MB/s (500GB)
  • 4K Random Read: Upwards to 110K IOPS (120GB), Upward to 120K IOPS (250/500GB)
  • 4K Random Write: Up to 100K IOPS (120GB, Up to 105K IOPS (250GB), Up to 108K IOPS (500GB)
  • Operating Temperature: 0C to 70C
  • Ability Consumption (Typical – Mobile Mark 2007 Workload):
    • Active: 2.46W (120GB), 2.99W (250GB), 3.52W (500GB)
    • Idle: 0.68W
  • Endurance:
    • 120GB: 70 TBW
    • 250GB: 100 TBW
    • 500GB: 200 TBW
  • Warranty: three-Years

The Silicon Move SM2263XT PCIe Gen3 x4 NVMe i.3 SSD Controller is new to united states of america here at Legit Reviews, so we took a closer wait at information technology. It turns out the SM2263XT has a DRAM-less blueprint that supports the Host Retention Buffer (HMB) architecture. This means that the SSD uses your PCs DRAM to enshroud needed data (mapping tables) and you can visually see that in the block diagram below. That sounds scary at beginning. What happens when the ability goes out or the drive is accidentally removed. It turns out the NVMe 1.3 specification was written to ensure the controller on HMB drives won't have data loss or data corruption while the Host Retentivity Buffer characteristic is beingness utilized. Basically the controller writes updated mapping information to the HMB, but there is still a master copy on the drives NAND Flash before beingness flushed. This is said to have very piddling touch to CPU resources and and a tiny hit to the systems retentivity bandwidth and capacity. We tried to run across how much memory was being used by this blueprint and noticed about 0.three GB less RAM beingness available on systems with 8GB and 16GB of system retentiveness. Windows ten began enabling this feature (Host Retentivity Buffer) past default with the Fall Creators Update and is not officially supported on older operating systems.

Silicon Motion SM2263XT Block Diagram

When you look at the official speed ratings from Silicon Move in the tabular array beneath, the SM2263XT controller has 280,000 IOPS for 4K Random Read with HMB, simply but 140,000 IOPS without HMB. Then, proficient news to those running the latest version of Windows x. HP looks to have rated this drive without HMB enabled every bit a worst instance scenario. You'll see in our testing that we hit close to 250K IOPS on the EX900 500GB drive, doubling HP's 4K Random Read rating of 120K IOPS. We reached out to Silicon Movement and were informed that HMB is something firmware assail the HP EX900 and information technology cannot exist disabled past the terminate user.

SM2263 SM2263XT SM2262 SM2262EN
Host Interface PCIe Gen3 x4 PCIe Gen3 x4 PCIe Gen3 x4 PCIe Gen3 x4
PCIe Protocol NVMe ane.three NVMe 1.3 NVMe one.3 NVMe 1.3
NAND Flash Channel 4 4 8 viii
CE/Channel 4 4 4 4
DRAM Yes no DRAM Yes Yes
Seq. Read 2400 MB/southward 2400 MB/s 3200 MB/s 3500 MB/southward
Seq. Write 1700 MB/southward 1700 MB/s 1900 MB/s 3000 MB/south
Random Read 300K IOPS 280K IOPS(HMB)

140K IOPS(no HMB)

 370K IOPS 370K IOPS
Random Write 250K IOPS 250K IOPS 300K IOPS 300K IOPS

The exact model that we'll be testing today is the HP SSD EX900 1000.ii 500GB PCIe NVMe SSD that is sold nether part number 2YY44AA#ABC for $179.99 shipped or $0.36 per GB. This is the flagship model for this series as has the highest sequential speeds ratings of 2100 MB/s read and 1500 MB/due south write. This chapters drive has a 200 TBW endurance rating and is backed by a three-twelvemonth warranty.

HP SSD EX900 Retail Packaging

Inside the retail packaging you'll find clam shell packaging that contains the bulldoze, quick start guide and an extra spiral for your Chiliad.2 slot if yous happened to misplace the one that came with your motherboard.

HP SSD EX900 M.2 500GB Drive

The HP SSD EX900 series features a black PCB design heatsink with a white characterization over some of the 3D TLC NAND Wink memory. The controller is located on the far left of the bulldoze and is covered by a thin slice of heat dissipating metal that is labeled HP H8068. If you pare this off you'd find the superlative of the bodily SMI SM2263XT controller. In that location are four Micron 64-Layer 3D TLC NAND Wink packages on this drive that are labeled BW29F1T08EMHAF. On the lower left corner in the picture in a higher place you might be able to make out an LED light and things blinks cherry-red when the drive is actively being used.

HP SSD EX900 M.2 Single-Sided Drive

The bottom of the this single-sided One thousand.two 2280 drive doesn't have a place for whatsoever components to be mounted. Before we forget, the HP EX900 Chiliad.ii series has total compatibility with HPdst.exe (HP Software Pre-installation Environment) and is ideal for upgrading HP PCs equally it was fully tested and certified in HP Laboratories.

HP does non have a costless software utility for drive management, then let's have a look at the exam platform and get straight to the benchmarks!