You could look at the HP FX900 PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD (starts at $64.99 for 512GB; $104.99 for 1TB as tested) as the value counterpart of the HP FX900 Pro, an elite speedster among internal solid-state drives. But that would be doing the cheaper drive a disservice. Although its rated throughput is at the low end for PCI Express 4.0 SSDs we've reviewed recently, the FX900 largely held its own against drives with higher read and write speeds in our benchmark testing. And it comes in at a highly consumer-friendly price.

A PCIe 4 SSD with DRAM-Free TLC Memory

The HP FX900, which is designed and manufactured in conjunction with Chinese memory chip maker BiWin, is a PCIe 4x4 drive manufactured on an M.2 Type-2280 (80mm long) "gumstick" PCB. It employs the NVMe 1.4 protocol over the PCIe 4.0 bus. It features an InnoGrit IG5220 (RainierQX) controller and is based on Micron's 176-layer 3D TLC NAND flash. (Check out our glossary of SSD terms if any of this lingo is unfamiliar to you.)

The InnoGrit controller lacks a DRAM cache, enlisting instead your PC's main memory as a host memory buffer (HMB). This helps keep the cost of the SSD down, seemingly without harming performance in our Windows-based benchmarks. The FX900 joins two other excellent DRAM-less PCI Express 4.0 NVMe SSDs we've reviewed this year, the WD Black SN770 and the Editors' Choice award-winning ADATA XPG Atom 50.

The label atop the drive conceals a graphene heat spreader, and an energy-efficient controller also helps keep the FX900's temperature down. The drive is thin enough to fit into a PlayStation 5's open slot, but its sequential read speed rating falls a bit short of Sony's recommendation for the PS5. The PS5 also lacks HMB architecture.

At this writing (early August 2022), a 2TB version of the FX900 is not yet for sale but is expected to be available soon. HP also offers 256GB and 512GB versions, but there are currently no plans to sell the former in the United States.

The FX900's durability ratings, as measured in terabytes written (TBW), are low for a TLC-based drive. The WD Black SN770, the Crucial P5 Plus, and the Samsung SSD 980 Pro are all rated at 600TBW and 1,200TBW for their 1TB and 2TB models respectively. The Kingston KC3000 has even higher ratings, 800TBW for 1TB and 1,600TBW for 2TB. The XPG Atom 50 is rated at 650TBW for 1TB.

A few PCIe 4.0 TLC drives offer much higher durability ratings—the Corsair Force Series MP600 and the Silicon Power US70 are rated at 1,800TBW for 1TB and 3,600TBW for 2TB. At the other end of the scale, QLC-based drives like the Mushkin Delta and the Sabrent Rocket Q4 are less durable, rated at just 200TBW for 1TB, 400TBW for 2TB, and 800TBW for 4TB.

The "terabytes written" spec is a manufacturer's estimate of how much data can be written to a drive before some cells begin to fail and get taken out of service. (TBW tends to scale 1:1 with capacity, as with the drives cited here.) HP's warranty covers the FX900 for five years or until you hit the rated TBW figure in data writes, whichever comes first.

Testing the FX900: Solid Performance, With Touches of Brilliance

We test PCI Express 4.0 internal SSDs using a desktop testbed with an MSI X570 motherboard and AMD Ryzen CPU, 16GB of Corsair Dominator DDR4 memory clocked to 3,600MHz, and a GeForce discrete graphics card. (See more about how we test SSDs.)

We put the HP FX900 through our usual internal solid-state drive benchmarks, comprising Crystal DiskMark 6.0 and PCMark 10 Storage, as well as a relatively new test, UL's 3DMark Storage Benchmark, which measures a drive's performance in a number of gaming-related tasks.

Crystal DiskMark's sequential speed tests provide a traditional measure of drive throughput, simulating best-case, straight-line transfers of large files.

Our Crystal DiskMark testing provides a good way to evaluate manufacturers' claimed speed ratings. The HP FX900 almost exactly matched its rated sequential read and write speeds, coming in just above its advertised figure for each. While the HP drive's 4K write speed was average, its 4K read speed essentially tied two other SSDs at the top of our comparison group of PCIe 4 drives.

In the PCMark 10 Overall Storage benchmark, which measures a drive's speed in everyday storage tasks such as loading games and launching programs including the Windows operating system, the FX900 delivered a middling score. Its results in our trace testing, which evaluate the individual components that go into the overall score, were solid and occasionally better than solid—its score in loading Windows 10 basically tied the ADATA XPG Atom 50 at the head of the class, as did its speed in launching Battlefield 5.

In the 3DMark Storage gaming test, the FX900 landed at the bottom of a very narrow range of results among the smaller group of drives on which we've run that benchmark.

In summary, although the FX900's read and write speed ratings were near the bottom of our PCIe 4 comparison group, it not only hit those rated speeds but turned in respectable and in a few cases superior test scores.

An M.2 SSD Priced to Sell

The HP FX900 is a no-frills PCI Express 4 internal solid-state drive that delivered good results even compared with drives with considerably higher throughput ratings. Among the tests in which it did particularly well were two of significance to gamers, 4K reads and launching Battlefield 5. Its DRAM-less architecture didn't seem to hurt its performance for everyday operations, while keeping its cost per gigabyte among the lowest in the PCIe 4.0 SSD segment.

The FX900 skips an aluminum heatsink in favor of a graphene heat spreader, and it lacks the 256-bit AES hardware-based encryption found in some similar drives including the Editors' Choice-winning ADATA Atom 50. Its durability rating is relatively low in terms of terabytes written, but that shouldn't be an issue unless you're constantly writing and overwriting large amounts of data.

Of course, some gamers will insist on one of the latest high-performance PCI Express 4 NVMe drives with rated sequential read speeds in the 7,000MBps range. But high throughput doesn't always translate into great performance in our benchmark tests. The DRAM-less HP FX900 is priced below but punches above its weight class. It's well worth consideration by gamers looking for a capable drive at a bargain price.