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HP EX900 M.2 X4 NVMe

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I've found my EX900 to stay cool and reliable. I'm using it for Windows 10 though instead of macOS.

That's good to know @trs96, thanks. My next build will replace the Dell 7010 inside my BluEye with a Gigabyte H370M D3H MB. It has dual NVMe PCIe Gen3 M.2 slots, which I can use for macOS and Windows10pro. I have never tried Windows on these HP NVMe, I'm reluctant to install in the current BluEye after losing the HP EX920!. But I'm curious to know how it performs in Windows, especially when it comes to loading games.
 
Forgot to mention that I'm using it in a 5 y.o. Gigabyte motherboard that has a PCIe 2.0 x2 M.2 slot. So it's not even running at the full x4 lanes speed. Expect even better performance when it's installed to a x4 slot. :)

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My 9020 Optimac has been idle for the past 20 minutes and this is how the EX900 is holding up in macOS. Even though it's in a much smaller case than G5, idle temp holds in the low 30's. And after 5 months of use HWM says it has 100% life. Admittedly I'm not editing 4K videos or moving large files back and forth.
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the EX900 is holding up in macOS. Even though it's in a much smaller case than G5, idle temp holds in the low 30's.
When I took my Crystal Disk Info reading, not sure those are really accurate anyway, I had been just downloading and installing GBs of Windows updates so it isn't normally staying in the mid 50s C temp range.
 
When I took my Crystal Disk Info reading, not sure those are really accurate anyway, I had been just downloading and installing GBs of Windows updates so it isn't normally staying in the mid 50s C temp range.
That’s interesting!, when downloading GB’s in macOS the NVMe will hit 59-60 C.
 
Why go with a low cost HP branded NVME drive ?
I was recently reading through some Amazon reviews of "budget" NVME drives and came across this review about the SP or Silicon Power brand drives. SP drives have much faster benchmark speeds than the EX900 drives do yet the prices are fairly close. Are the SP drives really a better value ?

Here's what a computer shop owner that has installed hundreds of SP drives wrote.
I am a small local computer shop that has been in business for over 10 years. I have been upgrading customer's computers with SSDs for really the last 4 years now and I have a crate of these that have all failed. I have purchased over 1000 SSDs in the last year where half of them were Silicon Power and the other half bigger brand names. In the last 12 months I have had more than 25% of the Silicon Power drives come back to me DOA. Where I have had maybe 1 or 2 bigger name brand drives come back to me only FAILING not completely dead. I know I am a small sample size but that failure rate is terrible. Yes, they might work fine for half a year or right when you pull it out of the box and write your review of only owning the product for 1 day. I have been waiting to write this review to let some time pass to think it was a fluke but to this day I am still getting these drives back. Their RMA process is awful and at this point I would not want more of these drives.

I haven't bought more than 3 SP drives but have also found them to be un-reliable and poorly made. When you go with a low cost drive go with a major player like HP. They have good quality control and warranty support. SP, not so much. The only thing these HP NVME drives are missing is a DRAM memory controller which most of the more expensive drives have. If you have 8GB or more of ram in your system it doesn't really make any difference in the drives performance. We've all got plenty of ram sitting there inactive most of the time. With these HP EX900 drives, your system ram, up to about 1GB max, will serve as a DRAM cache.
 
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I've been reading some reviews of the HP EX900, they're not all as negative as this, but he did buy a lot of them!. Mine became unreadable and Disk Utility or Windows can't fix it, even terminal commands!. But all is not lost, I heard back from HP SSD Warranty Service today!. If you've had one of these fail, send an email to: support [at] multipointe [dot] com

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Consumer Advice. I was reading this yesterday, link to article, about the HP EX900 which was on sale. I sent an email to the author of the article and received this response.
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So I think the lesson here is check your reviews from other sites also, not just Amazon. Still waiting for HP warranty service to respond!.
 
So I think the lesson here is check your reviews from other sites also, not just Amazon. Still waiting for HP warranty service to respond!.
The reason many of these fail, any NVME really is that they don't get proper cooling. Running them hard without any heatsink is not a good idea. I'm sure you know by now how excessive heat affects most hardware.
 
I'm sure you know by now how excessive heat affects most hardware.
Yes, I'm fully aware!. On a positive note I just received an email from HP SSD Warranty Service and received a RMA, they have agreed to replace both HP EX900 250 GB and the HP EX920 250 GB. Happy days!.
 
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