I will defend to the end of times (well, as long as SATA is still a thing and motherboards pack in 6 M.2 slots that can all be fully accessed) the need for 2.5″ drives. I get that NVMe has come down significantly in price over time but the usefulness of 2.5″ SATA SSDs is as high as ever. That’s why it’s good to see new drives coming along on this form factor. In collaboration with their partner BIWIN, who has 25 years’ worth of R&D in storage and microelectronics, HP is updating their S700 series of 2.5″ SSDs to the HP SSD S750 2.5″ on the SATA 3 interface.
Some key features of their new drivers include:
- Next Generation 96-layer 3D NAND Flash
- SATA 3 connection
- Up to 560MB/s Read
- Full Capacity SSD
At this point, the theoretical performance of SATA 3 has been peaked and the HP SSD S750 is no exception with HP claiming speeds of up to 560MB/s sequential read speeds and 520MB/s sequential write speeds, both of which are great for the form factor. They will be offered in 3 capacity variants with 1TB, 521GB, and 256GB and all of them maintain the full sequential read/write performance but differs on random read/write OIPS, likely due to using different NAND die sizes.
HP and BIWIN aren’t clear on which controller they’re using SSD S750 so it’s hard to make any judgment calls on whether or not the drive is using DRAM or not, which could be a big deciding factor on their value. But, with the middle of the road 512GB version packing in the same sequential performance but the highest random read/write IOPS by quite a margin over the 256GB and the 1TB, it would be the most attractive one to use if being put to work as a primary storage device rather than just a secondary game drive or such.
Pricing and availability haven’t been announced as of yet.
