Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

HP’s Z Turbo Drive G2 might be the new SSD performance champion

Matthew S. Smith
By

hp z turbo drive g2 challenges intels 750 series promises even better performance hpzdriveg2
Only a couple weeks ago we reviewed Intel’s 750 Series, the first consumer-oriented drive adhering to Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe), a new standard for hard drives that connects through PCI Express. It was a performance knock-out without peer, but it may already have a challenger.

HP is rising to combat Intel with its Z Turbo Drive G2. In many ways the drive is very similar to the 750 Series. It comes as a PCI Express add-in card, it connects over the NVMe standard, and promises to be usable as a boot drive in any system that can handle NVMe drives.

Recommended Videos

There are some notable differences, though. Intel’s drive comes in 400GB and 1.2TB capacity, but HP is shipping in more traditional 256GB and 512GB capacities. That means the Z Turbo Drive G2 offers less space, but it may also make the drive more practical, as the large size of the Intel drives put them out of reach for some buyers. HP also won’t be offering a 2.5-inch version, as Intel does.

Related

HP says the drives, which feature hardware built by Samsung, can deliver read bandwidth of up to 2,510 megabytes per second. Write bandwidth is quoted at 1,260MB/s for the 256GB model and 1,550MB/s for the 512GB version. The larger drive is also more durable. The 256GB is rated to endure 146 terabytes of writes, while its big brother can handle 292TB. With that said, neither drive is likely to fail under normal home use; these figures will only be relevant to enterprise buyers.

The bandwidth figures actually exceed the Intel 750 Series, which quotes read speeds no higher than 2,400MB/s for the 1.2TB model and write speeds no greater than 1,200MB/s. However, the Intel drives handle random reads and writes more quickly. HP’s Z Turbo Drive G2 can manage 300,000 read input/output operations per second (IOPS), but the 750 Series maxs out at 440,000.

Both drives are expected to become available in June. That’s a bit behind Intel’s drives, which will be available on April 24th. Pricing may be a sticking point, too, as HP says the 256GB drive will be $399 and the 512GB model will be $699. That actually results in significantly higher price-per-gigabyte than the Intel 750 Series. The Z drives won’t be cheap, but they may be the new performance champions.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Matthew S. Smith
Matthew S. Smith
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Matthew S. Smith is the former Lead Editor, Reviews at Digital Trends. He previously guided the Products Team, which dives…
Transcends builds tiny 1TB M.2 solid state drive for super-thin laptops
transcend ultrathin 1tb solid state drive m 2

Want an entire terabyte of solid state storage in your Ultrabook? Transcend's MTS800 now comes with up to 1TB of space in its tiny form factor, stretching how much storage an ultrathin can offer.

The Transcend MTS800, an M.2 (80mm) SSD, uses the extremely thin M.2 form factor known as 2280. That means it will fit in the thinnest laptops, but it's not small on storage. It comes in sizes ranging from 32GB all the way up to 1TB.

Read more
Plextor strikes back with new NVMe-equipped M8Pe solid state drive
after a shaky start plextor is back with the nvme equipped m8pe ssd line plaxtor pci e a02 451 100635234 large

Back in the distant year of 2014, Taiwanese drive company Plextor announced one of the world's first PCI-E solid state drives, one that it would eventually plan to follow-up earlier this year with the M7e. Unfortunately, the M7e product never saw the light of day, as it was surreptitiously canned over the summer.

Rather than reviving the failed M7e, Plextor has decided to move on to the M8Pe, an M.2 SSD complete with all the bells and whistles we've come to expect from high-end drives. The M8Pe will connect to desktops over a 4x PCIe 3.0 slot and leverage the outstanding NVMe interface. That lets the company claim beefy 4KB random reads of up to 270,000 operations per second, and 4KB write speeds up to 150,000 IOPS.

Read more
New six-terabyte SSD from Fixstars is the largest of its kind yet
fixstars reveals a 2 5 inch ssd with six terabytes of storage

Fixstars unveiled a new 2.5-inch SSD on May 7, which has 6TB of storage. The SSD-6000M is 9.5mm thick and uses the SATA 6Gb/s interface. Most notably, it surpasses the SSD-3000M drive that was released last year by SanDisk, which offers only 4TB of storage and was the largest of its kind at the time.

The SSD uses 15-nm MLC NAND attached to a proprietary controller, according to The Tech Report. The combination is rated for 540MB/s sequential reads and 520MB/s sequential writes. That's not the quickest performance available today, but it's not bad, either.

Read more