HP S700 Pro 1 TB SSD review - Introduction

HP S700 Pro 1TB 2.5" SSD

We test a new NAND Flash storage unit in the HP Series S700 2.5" SSD, the rather properly volume sized 1024 GB (1 TB), model which we will review. The S700 Pro series offers a compete range of good performing storage products, yet price-competitive at mainstream to high-end class SATA3 performance.  The new 1 TB version is a notch faster then the previous model we tested, with up-to 570 MB/sec reads.

• Max Sequential Read - Up to 570 MBps
• Max Sequential Write - Up to 525 MBps
• 4KB Random Read - Up to 90,000 IOPS
• 4KB Random Write - Up to 95,000 IOPS
• Read Latency - 0.033ms
• Write Latency - 0.030ms
• Endurance (TBW) up to 650 TBW

The S700 Pro 1TB SSD offers decent enough speed (for a SATA3 unit) and remains competitive in pricing. As you guys know, we've been testing NAND Flash based storage ever since the very beginning, and it is surprising to see where we have gotten. The SSD market is fierce and crowded though. While stability and safety of your data have become a number one priority for the manufacturers, the technology keeps advancing at as fast a pace as it does, the performance numbers a good SSD offers these days are simply breathtaking! You get between 450 MB/s to 500 MB/sec on SATA3 which is the norm for a single controller based SSD. Next to that, over the past year, NAND flash memory (the storage memory used inside an SSD) has become much cheaper as well. Prices a year ago settled at just under 1 USD per GB. That was two to threefold two years ago. These days a good SSD can be found under 40~50 cents per GB. With parties like Samsung, Toshiba and Micron the prices have now dropped towards and below the 30 cents per GB marker. This means that SSD technology and NAND storage has gone mainstream and due to the lower prices, the volume sizes go up as well. A couple of years ago a 64 GB SSD was hot stuff, then slowly we moved to 120 GB, last year 240 GB for an SSD in a PC was the norm, this upcoming year we'll transition slowly to roughly 500 GB per SSD as the norm with sub 150 USD prices. With the market being so huge, fierce and competitive, it brought us to where we are today... nice volume SSDs at acceptable prices with very fast performance. Not one test system in my lab has a HDD, everything runs on SSD while I receive and retrieve my bigger chunks of data from a NAS server here in the office. The benefits are performance, speed, low power consumption and no noise. 

We'll inspect the product PCB and components later on in the review in detail, but HP makes use of Micron for the NAND memory (the company company behind Crucial). These drives are based on vertically stacked NAND (also referred to as 3D NAND) and are now available multiple capacities. With a low power design, this drive will be among the mainstream to fastest SSDs we have ever tested. It’s not just about performance though, these units manage 570 MB/s and write speeds of up to 525 MB/s with 4K IOPS of performance in the 90K ranges for both reads and writes. The S700 Pro series are based on 3d v-nand (TLC) based paired towards a Proprietary HP controller. The unit is making use of a dynamic SLC written buffer which will keep the TLC effect far away and keep performance high during high burst write workloads. HP guarantees this SSD for 3 years under warranty.