INTRODUCTION

   With just a couple of months away until the official launch of the very first consumer oriented PCIe 5.0 Gen5 SSD models more and more PCIe 4.0 Gen4 are getting released every single day into the market. Now as many of you are certainly aware compared to PCIe 3.0 Gen3 M.2 NVMe SSDs and even SATA SSDs we haven't seen nearly that many DRAMless PCIe 4.0 Gen4 M.2 NVMe models, something which never did sit well with me (not with the performance increase between PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 models). Lately however not 1 but 2 DRAMless PCIe 4.0 Gen4 M.2 NVMe v1.4 models arrived in the lab almost at the same exact time, the ATOM 50 1TB by XPG/ADATA (review here) and the FX900 1TB by HP (BIWIN).

   HP ranks annually among the world's most recognized and valuable brands. Fuelled by innovative research and distinctive marketing, the HP brand is famous as a world leader in personal computers, printers, and other IT products. Under an official worldwide license, HP personal storage (SSDs, DRAM, and memory cards) products are designed, built, marketed, and sold by BIWIN Storage Technology. All trademarks are property of the respective brand owners.

   Just like the XPG ATOM 50 the HP FX900 (currently available in 256GB/512GB/1TB/2TB capacities) is also based on the same RainierQX IG5220 DRAM-less NAND flash controller by Innogrit which is once again paired with Micron's 176-layer 3D TLC NAND flash. The Innogrit RainierQX IG5220 is a quad-channel NAND flash controller that features support for various technologies including the Host Memory Buffer (HMB) architecture (basically takes up a fraction of your PC's system memory to cache mapping tables - only supported on versions of Windows 10/11 launched from 2019 and beyond), end-to-end data protection, Gen3 LDPC (low-density parity check) error-correction with SRAM ECC, programmable RAID, smart cache, TRIM, NCQ, AES 256-bit encryption, SHA3 256, ONFI 5.0 and Toggle 2/3/4/5.0. In terms of performance the FX900 1TB can reach 5000MB/s in reads and 4800MB/s in writes whereas in terms of durability HP reports a TBW (terabytes written) of 100/200/400/800TB for the available variants (256GB/512GB/1TB/2TB) and a MTBF (meantime between failures) of 1.000.000 hours (the entire FX900 line is covered by a 5 year limited warranty). So, let's see what the HP (BIWIN) FX900 1TB is capable of.