HP Z Turbo 512GB PCIe SSD Review - With RAID 0 Numbers

Introduction

HP recently offered a new option to purchasers of the company's workstation products. The new HP Z Turbo offers content makers a chance to increase data throughput performance while working on typical workstation data, engineering applications, and content creation.

With video moving to higher resolutions like 4K, high-resolution audio on the rise, and ever increasing processing power that allows for more complex physics rendering, the need to move data at a higher rate is required for current and next generation applications to run at a smooth pace.

HP tapped Samsung's XP941 PCIe 2.0 x4 SSD in both 256GB and 512GB capacities for the Z Turbo. HP used customized firmware for the Z Turbo that seems to handle mixed workload (reads mixed with writes) data better than off-the-shelf XP941 drives from RamCity that we tested.

Specifications, Pricing, and Availability

HP's Z Turbo SSDs come in two capacities, 256GB and 512GB. The larger model offers higher throughput and random performance of up to nearly 1.2 GB/s. According to HP's specifications sheet, the 256GB model can read data at 1.08 GB/s. The sequential write speeds come in at 930 MB/s for the 512GB model, and 800 MB/s for the 256GB model. The throughput performance is nearly twice as high as real-world SATA 6Gbps performance found on the market today.

HP offers the Z Turbo as an option on the company's Z line of workstation products. The company also sells single drives to retrofit into existing workstations. The 256GB model costs $499, and the 512GB model sells for $899. Both CDW and B&H carry both capacities with listed prices lower than HP's MSRP.

Actually, the Z Turbo can't be used as a boot device on our Z820 test system since the required UEFI BIOS isn't present. Newer Zx40 series workstations can use the Z Turbo as a boot device, but I suspect most users will want to configure the system with the Z Turbo as a secondary drive. The secondary drive configuration means your intensive workload can take place without reducing the IO performance of your applications.