HP SSD EX920 1TB M.2 Drive Review

By Nathan Kirsch

Final Thoughts & Conclusions

If you would have told me that Hewlett-Packard (HP) SSDs would be near the top of our performance charts in 2018 months ago we might have laughed at you. The SSD market has been dominated by Samsung for years, but it is clear that other controller companies have managed to catch up. The Samsung SSD 960 PRO series came out in 2016 and has up to 3500 MB/s sequential read and 2100 MB/s sequential write speeds. The HP SSD EX920 M.2 1TB drive comes close to that with 3200 MB/s sequential read and 1800 MB/s sequential write speeds. HP is just a few hundred MB/s shy of what is widely regarded as the best drive on the market. In our file transfer test the HP SSD EX 920 M.2 1TB drive was just 80MB/s slower than the Samsung SSD 960 PRO 2TB drive and in our game load time test the HP EX 920 was faster! The kicker here is that the Samsung SSD 960 PRO 1TB drive costs $615.18 shipped, whereas the HP SSD EX920 M.2 1TB drive runs $369.99 shipped. Samsung has higher endurance ratings thanks in part to MLC V-NAND, a longer 5-year warranty, a custom NVMe driver and software toolkit for drive management, but is that worth the extra $245 to our readers?

HP SSD EX920 M.2 Drive Retail Packaging Inside

Right now we are impressed by what HP has done on both the HP SSD EX900 and HP SSD EX 920 series. The performance is solid and the pricing is lower than one might expect!

HP SSD EX900 M.2 Series Pricing

HP SSD EX920 M.2 Series Pricing

The HP SSD EX920 1TB drive we reviewed today is $369.99 shipped and that is a good price for what you get. We would have loved to see a longer 5-year warranty on this drive, but HP seems to be favoring 3-years warranties on all of their drives. The HP SSD EX920 M.2 1TB drive offers high-end performance with a price tag that is impressive. Most people install a drive and don’t want to mess with custom drivers or software anyway.

With a little luck you might even be able to find the HP EX920 series on sale. Newegg Business is currently selling the HP EX920 M.2 512GB model for $172.99, which is 14% off the $199 MSRP price. That puts it below the HP SSD EX900 500GB drive retail price and competitors like the Intel SSD 760p 512GB ($221.71), Samsung SSD 960 EVO 500GB ($199.99) and the Samsung SSD 960 PRO 512GB ($324.99 shipped).

LR Recommended Award

Legit Bottom Line: The HP SSD EX920 1TB drive performs better than expected and it is one of the fastest drives on the market today!