HP SSD EX920 1TB M.2 Drive Review

Linear Write, File Transfer and Game Load Time Testing

AIDA64 Disk Benchmark

We’ve had some people ask for AIDA64 linear write tests to be done, so we fired that utility up to see what would happen.

When you take a look at extended sustained write performance you’ll see that the performance started out at around 1700 to 1800 MB/s and then dropped down to around 875 MB/s once the drives SLC cache was full. Once the drives cache was full, the controller allowed data to be written directly to the TLC NAND Flash memory and that is why the performance looks like it fell off a cliff. The good news is that one would have to write over 100GB of data to the drive without any breaks for this to happen. Just before 50% of the drive was written to there was a performance drop that got down to 173.5 MB/s, but it quickly recovered when that happened.

Real World File Transfer

Let’s see how real-world was when writing a movie folder containing seven 1080P movies over to the SSD. For this test, we are going to simply stress write performance by transferring over a 30.6GB folder of movies off of a PCIe NVMe SSD to the drive being tested to see how performance looks.

The HP SSD EX920 Series 1TB drive finished our file transfer test at 1446.1 MB/s, which makes it the third fastest drive that we have tested in this workload behind the Intel Optane 900P 480GB and Samsung SSD 960 PRO 2TB drives.

Game Load Time Testing

When we tested game load time testing on the drive we found that the HP SSD EX920 M.2 1TB drive was able to move up into second place by beating the Samsung SSD 960 PRO 2TB drive. The HP SSD EX920 M.2 1TB drive is clearly a high-end drive that does well with file transfers and game load times!