INTRODUCTION

   Because of their impressive read and write performance numbers and small form factor M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD drives are becoming more popular by the day. On top of that the recent introduction of the new Intel Z490 and AMD B550 motherboard models should also help boost sales numbers so it's no wonder that there's not a single storage media manufacturer that hasn't shifted its focus in the design and manufacture of such drives. HP was never that much into storage media manufacturing and so it wasn't only until a while back that they came to an agreement with BIWIN Storage (one of the largest Chinese storage media OEM's currently) to produce SSDs (internal and portable) and RAM modules using their brand name and of course their "strict" performance and quality specifications. Today with me i have one such drive and more specifically the EX950 1TB model.

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   Just like the KC2000/2500 models by Kingston the EX950 line of M.2 NVMe PCIe SSDs by HP (currently available in 512GB/1TB/2TB capacities) uses the same SM2262EN 8-channel NAND flash controller by Silicon Motion so right from the get go it's clear that this is among the fastest drives of its type in the market today. To be more precise HP states performance numbers of 3500MB/s in reads and 2900MB/s in writes for the entire EX950 family and as for the SM2262EN controller once again you can expect top-end features like Silicon Motion’s proprietary NANDXtend error-correcting code (ECC), datapath protection, end to end data protection with SRAM ECC, S.M.A.R.T, TRIM, NCQ, thermal-throttling, active garbage collection, DevSleep (device sleep), LDPC (Low Density Parity Check), SLC write acceleration (algorithms for optimal sustained performance), AES-XTS 256bit hardware encryption, TCG Opal 2.0 and IEEE-1667 (rendering all drives fully compatible with Microsoft's eDrive and EU's GDPR). Unlike however its immediate competition the company behind the EX950 decided to pair the SM2262EN controller with 64 layer 3D TLC NAND flash by Micron and DRAM by Nanya. HP covers the entire EX950 line with a rather generous 5 year limited warranty and as for endurance numbers the reported numbers are 320TBW for the 512GB variant, 650TBW for the 1TB variant and 1400TBW for the 2TB variant.