HP EX900 PRO 1TB NVMe SSD review - Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

HP offers a reasonable fast product (for NVMe) with the EX900 Pro, it plenty fast enough for anything you need to do one a standard workstation or gaming PC, but not as fast as the new PCIe Gen 4.0 units), The overall throughput of the NVMe SSD is splendid, it will not hit that TLC write hole and thus overall is a strong contender offering all the perf you need really. The pricing of these units have gone down already, currently, this 1TB model that we have tested can be spotted for roughly 150 USD. And while that is not yet that 12 Cents per GB market, it's pretty close whilst being a very high-end product. NVMe based M.2. have been growing and advancing in performance really fast with NAND, combine it with a proper controller, and you can get enthusiast-class performance, and that at 14~15 cents per GB. So yes, the HP EX900 PRO 1TB managed to dazzle, especially when looking at overall performance averaged out over all types of workloads, this SSD averages out incredibly well. The Vertically stacked TLC written NAND in combination with the HP H8089 controller, a renovated Silicon Motion SM2262 controller and a proper DRAM cache reveals 2GB/s reads in specific workloads with close to 2 GB/s in writes. 

Performance

Technologies like TLC and QLC face some challenges writing more bits per cell of NAND, we, however, did not notice a dropoff in performance with mixed heavy workloads, so the dreaded TLC write hole did not kick in (and I do mean continuously sustained/linear writes minute after minute). See when then the SSD buffers are full and start to write directly to TLC NAND that could be an issue. This, in a nutshell, is what you need to be aware of with TLC and QLC SSDs. IOPS performance is good on this unit, really good. The overall workload traces also indicate this SSD to be extremely capable and fast.

TBW values are okay as well, 650 TBW for the 1 TB model. Albeit how companies calculate or test these values these days, is a bit of a mystery. A listed TBW value, however, is something you can pin them on warranty wise.

• 160 TBW for 256GB model
• 320 TBW for 512 GB model
• 650 TBW for 1 TB model

  

Concluding

We think that the new EX900 PRO is a terrific series for high-end workstations and game PCs, if priced right.  It offers very decent read/write values in that 2GB/sec range, which is plenty fast for anyone. It doesn't run hot under hefty load and we did not notice any TLC write hole, meaning this thing can write full speed even with a 100 GB file. Prices vary per week though, two weeks ago the SSD was even 15 bucks cheaper. The latest96 and  64-layer Vertically stacked NAND works its miracles, and the add-in partners benefit from that. The HP EX900 PRO series will offer loads of performance at a very acceptable price level. HP will give you a 5-year warranty on the product series, and that in technology land is the proper warranty to have. So yes, this is to enthusiast-class in NVMe terms, but it is a rocksolid offering none the less.

The latest prices are just in, not bad either, at 11~12 cents per GB.

EX900 Pro MSRP   

• 256GB 49.99$        
• 512GB 74.99$     
• 1TB  114.99$

We thank BIWIN Storage for supplying this review sample, they are an official HP Business Partner.

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