Today we are taking a look at the HP FX900 Pro 2TB NVMe SSD. We have previously reviewed the PCIe Gen 3 predecessors to this drive in the HP EX900 and EX900 Plus, both of which were decent drives in their day. The FX900 Pro, however, is directly targeting the current high-end PCIe Gen 4 SSD market with rated specs to match, so I will have high expectations for this drive to live up to. Onward to the testing!
HP FX900 Pro 2TB NVMe SSD
The HP FX900 Pro 2TB comes in a double-sided M.2 2280 (80mm) form factor.
The HP FX900 Pro bundles 176-layer TLC NAND with an InnoGrit IG5236 controller. We have reviewed another drive with this controller in the past, the XPG GAMMIX S70. Combined with this is a DDR4 DRAM cache.
The rear side of the drive is home to the remaining two NAND packages and a DRAM module.
Sharp-eyed users might notice something funny about the front sticker on this drive; that is because it is not just a sticker.
Instead of bundling a heatsink, HP has instead bundled what they are calling a “graphene thermal pad” which they claim drops temperatures by “about 18” degrees C. Obviously that is a claim we will investigate!
HP FX900 Pro SSD Specs
The HP FX900 Pro line of SSDs is available in sizes between 512GB and 4TB.
Today we are looking at the 2TB model, which is rated at 7400 MB/s sequential read and 6700 MB/s sequential write. Those numbers will be impressive if the FX900 Pro manages to hit them and will put this drive in contention for the top of my benchmark charts. Endurance numbers for the 1TB drive is 600TBW and this 2TB model is 1200TBW; these ratings are plenty sufficient for almost all use cases but are in no way a standout feature as other drives like the Seagate FireCuda 530 have double the rated endurance of this model. Warranty support lasts 5 years, which is the industry standard on premium quality SSDs.
One thing to keep in mind later when perusing the benchmark results is that our review model is a 2TB drive, while most of the drives I review here on STH are at the 1TB capacity point. Generally speaking, that will give this drive an edge over a lot of my benchmark pool, so that is something to keep in mind.
CrystalDiskInfo can give us some basic information about the SSD and confirms we are operating at PCIe 4.0 x4 speeds using NVMe 1.4.
Test System Configuration
We are using the following configuration for this test:
- Motherboard: ASUS PRIME X570-P
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X (12C/24T)
- RAM: 2x 16GB DDR4-3200 UDIMMs
Our testing uses the HP FX900 Pro 2TB as the boot drive for the system, installed in the M.2_1 slot on the motherboard. The drive is filled to 85% capacity with data and then some is deleted, leaving around 60% used space on the volume.
Next, we are going to get into our performance testing.
Who is the component supplier for this HP product?
If the drive hits 82C it is definitely thermal throttling. Not sure if your test bench varies during the tests for speed vs thermals but you can’t compare the speed of if it’s thermal throttling and the other drives aren’t. For thermal tests sure, but if that same setup is used for transfer rate tests you have a bad system. Throw a little water loop with one of the Corsair m.2 water blocks on it so you can get good comparisons on all your drive speed tests.
Any drive that hits thermal limits during testing gets active cooling so that benchmarks are not affected by thermals.
SEQUENTIAL READ MEANS NOTHING FOR NVME.
Strongly disagree Wildcard. When you have 25GbE 40GbE or faster, it is easy to need NVMe sequential read speed limits. That’s easy.
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