The HP S700 And S700 Pro SSD Review
by Billy Tallis on September 7, 2017 9:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer
The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
The average data rates of the S700 Pros on The Destroyer are slightly faster than the ATATA SU800 except at the 128GB capacity. The S700's disadvantage relative to the S700 Pro is more pronounced at higher capacities, growing from a 15% gap at the 120GB/128GB capacity range to almost 30% between the 500GB S700 and 512GB S700 Pro.
The 250GB S700 surprises with a lower average latency than the 256GB S700 Pro, and at this capacity point and the 500GB/512GB capacity point both HP drives score better than the ADATA SU800. The 99th percentile latency scores aren't as good, with the S700 coming in last place at every capacity point and the S700 Pro only beating the ADATA SU800 in the 256GB capacity.
The average read latencies of the HP S700s are almost tied with the S700 Pro at the smallest capacity configuration, but the larger drives show a substantial gap. Average write latencies for the S700 are actually better than the S700 Pro and the ADATA SU800 except for the 120GB capacity.
The HP S700 does not have a particular problem with garbage collection getting in the way of read operations as its 99th percentile read latency scores are better than the S700 Pro's scores and are reasonable even when compared to mid-range SATA drives and even drives using MLC. The 99th percentile write latency scores are poor for both the S700 and S700 Pro, but the ADATA SU800 is no better except for its 128GB capacity.
The DRAMless HP S700 is more energy-efficient on The Destroyer than the faster HP S700 Pro, and both beat the ADATA SU800. All of these drives obey the usual pattern of higher capacities offering better efficiency under load thanks to their higher performance being more than enough to offset higher overall power levels.
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sonny73n - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link
You should compare the 850 EVO with the BX300. I don't care whether the EVO has better controller but I will take a 2-bit per cell NAND over a 3-bit any day.mapesdhs - Wednesday, September 13, 2017 - link
I just keep picking up lightly used 840 Pro 256GB units, people have forgotten how good they were and still are. It's annoying they no longer appear in review charts. Even the Vertex4 and Vector are still good compared to modern models.barleyguy - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link
You seem to be comparing retail price to street price. HP has sales almost constantly. These might be $116 initially, but they'll be discounted very quickly to lower prices. I fully expect them to be competitive pricewise.r3loaded - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
Hurray, yet another 2017 SSD that gets utterly curbstomped by a Samsung SSD from 2015 on both performance and price.8steve8 - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
1. Who is buying SATA SSDs in 20172. Why is Anandtech putting so much effort into SATA SSDs in 2017
Billy Tallis - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
I've yet to hear from a vendor that their volume of NVMe drives has even come close to matching their volume of SATA drives, for either the retail consumer market or the client OEM market. Even in the enterprise market, NVMe isn't close to killing off SATA and SAS yet.We have new technologies launching in SATA products like the Intel 545s and Western Digital's 3D NAND SSDs. SATA SSDs are still more cost effective than NVMe SSDs, and will be until there have been plenty of low-end NVMe controllers like Phison E8 and Silicon Motion SM2263 on the market for quite a while.
Elstar - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
Also:1) most motherboards are still loaded with SATA connectors
2) most motherboards have few if any NVMe connectors (other than traditional PCIe)
3) SATA drives are often more friendly to "sneaker net" security.
8steve8 - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
yes, most motherboards have lots of SATA, but they also have a PCIe m.2 slot... hard to find one that doesn't.but who's buying SATA SSDs? It's an honest question.
on newegg i see a $99 240GB m.2 NVMe SSD, so who would recommend this 256GB SATA drive with a retail price of $169?
bji - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link
Nice straw man. Answer: nobody would buy either. They'd buy a $90 250GB Samsung EVO. I just did last night.cfenton - Monday, September 11, 2017 - link
Lot's of people don't have motherboards that support m.2. You're right that most new motherboards support m.2, but there are a whole lot of people out there with 2+ year old computers who might want more storage or a faster boot drive. SSDs, of any kind, still aren't common in many OEM products, especially at the low end. A SATA SSD is still going to beat the hell out of any HDD.