Introduction

HP, aka Hewlett Packard, is one of the most well-know tech companies in the world. They produce nearly every product you can think of: laptops, desktops, printers, enterprise hardware, and solid-state drives.

Today, we have for review the HP EX950 SSD, which was released last year. Competing with the ADATA SX8200 and Samsung's lineup, the HP EX950 is known as one of the fastest solid-state drives out there. It comes in the M.2 form factor, using a fast PCI-Express x4 3.0 NVMe connection to interface with the rest of the system.

The HP EX950 is actually produced by BIWIN Storage, a large Chinese OEM for SSD solutions with 25 years of experience in the storage and microelectronics business. They were granted authorization from HP to produce SSDs in their name. Under the hood, the HP EX950 is built using a rebranded SM2262EN controller paired with Micron 64-layer 3D TLC flash. In order to ensure best performance, the HP EX950 has DRAM cache and SLC caching.

The HP EX950 is available in capacities of 256 GB (unknown), 512 GB ($87), 1 TB ($153), and 2 TB ($273, this review sample). Endurance for these models is set at 160 TBW, 320 TBW, 650 TBW, and 1300 TBW respectively. HP also includes a five-year warranty.

In this review we're testing the HP EX950 with the latest available firmware on retail mass-production units, but also include data for the HP EX950 with a firmware upgrade provided by HP after we recorded surprisingly low results in some tests.

Packaging

The Drive

The drive uses the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


Like most M.2 NVMe SSDs, the HP EX950 connects to the host system over a PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface.


On the PCB, you'll find the controller, four flash chips, and two DRAM chips.

Chip Component Analysis

The Silicon Motion SM2262 is an eight-channel flash controller with support for NVMe 1.3, TLC, and DDR3/DDR4 memory. Apparently, HP has customized it in some way, as evident by the HP logo and the different model number.


The four flash chips are Micron 64-layer 3D TLC NAND; they have been rebranded by HP, too. Each chip has a capacity of 512 GB.


Two Micron DDR3-1600 chips provide a total of 2 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.