HP FX900 1 TB NVMe Review

Memory (DDR4/DDR5) and Storage (SSD/NVMe) 367 Page 17 of 17 Published by

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Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion 

The HP SSD FX900 looks nice for an NVMe drive. HP has offered some good SSDs over the years, like the EX950 or EX900 Pro, which were granted an “approved” guru3d award. Now they’ve offered an NVMe drive showing that pairing a suitable controller and flash can offer excellent everyday performance. This drive is not earth-quaking fast for everyday use; you probably won’t see a difference from a regular PCIe 3.0 disk. Still, It’s an affordable, super-fast drive without much market analysis. The human element is that this drive feels good to use, mainly because it’s so efficient. In addition, the 4-channel, DRAM-less design is not a limiting factor. The FX900 writes at around 4.8 GB/s for approximately 60 seconds, suggesting a cache size of about 300GB, inpSLC mode. Then the drive falls to a direct-to-TLC way at about 2 GB/s. This is a TLC NAND product, which shows in some areas (long sustained writes). There is no radiator applied, but the graphene thermal pad works well. The HP SSD FX900 should be an excellent choice for typical office users or gamers; it should also be suitable for some heavy users (not literally, of course). It is the company’s second higher-end M.2 NVMe SSD with PCI-Express 4.0 capability (the first was the FX900 Pro, which we’ll probably cover in the future). As it’s paired with an Innogrit IG5220 controller, the overall performance is high; it’s sometimes surprisingly close to the top SSD currently available. This can be seen in synthetic tests and, more importantly, in simulating actual use. The black PCB includes Micron’s 176-layer NAND Flash TLC B47R 176-layer, BW29F4T08ENLEE chips. There is no DRAM cache, but it doesn’t bring any visible disadvantage. This is a high-performance SSD with TLC writing, high endurance, and a 5-year guarantee. 


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Do we need 5000+ MB/sec storage units?

It is a higher-end performance product, often synthetically measured, and you’d need serious workloads to get the best out of it. It is usually bought by the guys that purchase a GeForce RTX 3090 or Radeon RX 6900 XT combined with some Core i9 or Ryzen 9 series processor.  Your PC isn’t going to boot faster as your OS is the bottleneck; your PC games might load a fraction of a second faster, and your application load up just as quickly as an NVMe SSD with reads/writes in the 2 GB/sec marker. In retrospect, however, we have new technologies like DirectStorage. It will allow the graphics card to load textures directly from the SSD bypassing the processor, freeing up processor cycles for other tasks, and speeding up texture load times. In this way, if they have a fast M.2 disk, they will be in the game in less than 5 seconds, even on large maps, a little time compared to the loading times we are used to today. That technology should be released for Windows 11 (and 10, but this one is not the optimal one for this technique) 

Endurance

Endurance is the number of times NAND cells can be written before they die and are mapped out; any data present on that cell is re-written to a healthy one. Bigger volume sizes mean more NAND cells; more NAND cells thus increase endurance. HP SSD FX900 offers 400 TBW (Terabyte Written) for 1 TB unit, which we’ve reviewed) and 800 TBW for the 2 TB version. So how long does a 400 TBW storage unit last? If you are an extreme user, you might be writing 50 GB per day (normal users likely won’t even write that per week), but based on that value, 50GB x 365days = 18.25 TB per year written. So that’s almost 22 years of usage. Additionally - the reviewed drive has MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) of up to 1,000,000 Hours which is theoretically ~114 years. That’s long, isn’t it? Yeah never look at MTBF.

Thermals

The HP SSD FX900 has a graphite thermal pad provided in a bundle, and it surely helps keep the temperature under control, and there’s no throttling under an extreme workload. 

Performance

The HP SSD FX900 is fast. We don’t have any negative observations about the unit. It really performs as it should, no concerns here.

Conclusion

The HP SSD FX900 is an M.2 2280 NVMe SSD that utilizes an Innogrit IG5220 controller with 176-layer 3D TLC NAND NAND flash to support capacities of up to 2TB. There is no included DRAM cache chip, but the HP SSD FX900 is prepared to handle this scenario. The SSD features a PCIe Gen 4 NVMe interface for compatibility with PCs. To support the NVMe 1.4 standard, you do not need to install additional drivers; only ensure that your operating system is up to date. After that, install and format the SSD, and you’re good to go. HP warranties the storage unit for five years / or the claimed TBW value. Four storage capacities are available: 256 GB, 512 GB, 1TB, and 2TB. We believe you will not notice the real-world effect and difference between a 3GB/sec and a 5GB/sec (and even 7 GB/s) SSD anytime soon, but DirectStorage is getting supported soon, and that’s where it will matter. If an application loads in a fraction of a second, it will be quicker in that fraction of a second. Other than that somewhat personal remark, all lights are green, TLC, high endurance, and have a warranty (5 years). The provided graphene thermopad makes this SSD run relatively cold, and there’s no thermal throttling. For the best performance, you need a compatible Ryzen and a B550/X570 motherboard if you’re on the “red side.” If you like “the blue” s – the 11th gen and Z590 boards were the first to introduce it. HP SSD FX900 1 TB is, without any doubt, a solid product. The high efficiency evidences it. Thanks to its attractive pricing of just $105 for the reviewed 1 TB version, the cost is no longer a reason to pick an older PCIe 3.0 SSD over the FX900. Thanks to a large (almost 300 GB) SLC cache, the FX900 has good sustained write performance, especially considering its positioning. If you want the absolute best price-to-performance, you should consider that drive, and that’s why we grant it a” recommended” award.

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