HP SSD EX920 1TB M.2 Drive Review

By Nathan Kirsch

Anvil Storage Utilities

Anvil Storage Utilities 1.1.0

Along with the move to a new platform, we decided to make a change in one of the benchmarks. There’s a relatively new benchmark called Anvil Storage Utilities that is in beta but close to production. It’s a very powerful tool that measures performance through a variety of tests which can be customized. Since some of the tests more or less duplicate what we get from other benchmarks we use already, we decided to use the IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) testing on 4kb file sizes at a queue depth of 1, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 and 128. IOPS performance is something SSD makers tout quite a bit but we generally don’t do a lot of IOPS testing because frankly a lot of users can’t relate to IOPS metrics as well and it tends to be more meaningful to the enterprise/server crowd. Still, it is another performance indicator with relevance and while some drives post good MB/s numbers, their IOPS scores aren’t always commensurate which this test will prove out.

Anvil SSD Benchmark with 100% Compression (incompressible data):

Benchmark Results: The Anvil SSD Benchmark showed that with 100% compression (incompressible data) the HP SSD EX920 M.2 1TB drive had an overall score of 13,027.57 points. The drive topped out at 2,730.67 MB/s read and 1,638.40 MB/s write speeds on the sequential performance test with 4MB file sizes.

Anvil SSD Applications Benchmark at 46% Compression:

Benchmark Results: With the compression at 46% to help mimic real world applications better we found the overall score improved to 13,117.07 points.

Benchmark Results: When it comes to Random 4K performance at various queue depths we found solid performance numbers across the board! In fact, the low QD Random read performance on the HP SSD EX920 1TB drive was better than the Samsung SSD 960 PRO 2TB drive in the QD1-4 range!

Benchmark Results: When it came to 4K Random Write performance, the HP SSD EX9200 M.2 1TB drive had solid scores once again, but was behind the HP SSD EX900 512GB drive in the QD 1-4 range.

Here are a couple charts that show the EX900 500GB drive versus the EX920 1TB.