HP S600 2.5″ 240GB SATA SSD Review
Final Thoughts & Conclusions
The HP SSD S600 240GB drive did not perform as good as we expected it to. We were unable to reach the drives rated sequential speeds of 520 MB/s read and 500 MB/s write. To make matters worse we weren’t able to come close to the drives rated Random 4K performance numbers of 24,000 IOPs Read and 59,000 IOPS Write. We managed to hit just 5,500 IOPS read and 43,300 IOPS Write. This is way off the drives rated specifications, so we switched cables and ports and the results were the same. We then plugged in another brands SATA SSD that we already have tested into the same exact cable and port and everything was spot on. We’ve never tested an SSD and were unable to reach any of the drives rates speeds until today. The HP SSD S600 240GB is the culprit and there isn’t much else to say.
The HP SSD S600 240GB has an MSRP of $54.99, but is currently available on Amazon for $59.99 shipped. Who knows where Amazon got the $76 list price that they are showing, but the MSRP has always been $54.99 in our correspondence with Multipointe Channel Solutions (the company behind this drive and all HP branded drives). We asked them about the higher than MSRP street price our friends at Multipointe responded that they can only give guidance on pricing and that is it.
We contacted Multpointe about the street pricing because the HP SSD S700 Pro 256GB drive is available on Amazon for $62.68 shipped and last month was available for under $60. The HP SSD S700 Pro has been out for over a year and uses the SMI SM2258 4-channel controller with LRDDR3 Cache that has been paired with Micron 32-layer TLC NAND Flash. We don’t have that drive in-house for testing, but it has a pretty good reputation and the performance numbers look much better than the HP SSD S600 series. For an extra few bucks you can get a controller with twice the number of channels and DRAM cache along with better performance ratings and a longer warranty. The conclusion here is simple and we really don’t understand where the HP SSD S600 series fits in the market.
The budget SATA SSD market is packed full of good drives and the Crucial MX500 250GB drive at $64.99 shipped is still the drive to beat. The MX500 250GB drive has sequential reads/writes up to 560/510 MB/s and random reads/writes up to 95k/90k along with a 5-year warranty.
Legit Bottom Line: At the end of the day the HP SSD S600 is another DRAM-less drive that we would not recommend to our readers unless the price is greatly reduced and is being used in a system where performance doesn’t matter.