HP's FX700 is the first SSD with YMTC 232-layer QLC that makes it to the market (outside of China). YMTC, the Chinese flash memory manufacturer, has been making impressive progress in 2023, catching up with Samsung, Micron and Hynix in terms of fabrication technology. Just like many other recent value-oriented drives (like the Lexar NM790), the HP FX700 is built using the Maxiotech MAP1602 controller—another impressive release out of China. Just to clarify, the Lexar NM790 uses YMTC TLC flash, whereas the HP FX700 in this review uses YMTC QLC NAND, which stores four bits per cell instead of three. This results in a cost advantage, because you need fewer NAND cells to reach your target capacity. A DRAM cache is not included, ensuring the low price point can be achieved, but the FX700 uses 40 MB of HMB cache for the mapping tables of the SSD. This is a small change from the 32 MB that we saw on the 2 TB TLC drives, only the 4 TB TLC drives ran with 40 MB. It seems some additional HMB is allowed on the QLC SKUs. This could spell trouble for the 4 TB model though, because the MAP1602 tops out at 40 MB of HMB. For a 4 TB drive that would mean it has only the same amount of HMB available for its mapping tables as the 2 TB model, which will definitely come with a performance hit, probably bigger than what we've seen in our 4 TB MAP1602 reviews.

Synthetic performance results of the HP FX700 are quite similar to the Lexar NM790 (QLC vs TLC, but same controller), with the exception of 4K Random Mixed, which achieves only half the IO rate compared to the NM790. In this specific test both drives can't impress, which seems to be a weakness of the MAP1602 controller. Compared to other drives on the market, the FX700 clearly beats the Micron QLC-based Crucial P1, especially when it comes to sequential transfers. Overall, synthetic performance puts the drive roughly in the middle of the pack, which isn't impressive, but really not bad for a QLC drive.

Our real-life test results show very good numbers for the FX700 (considering that it's QLC). It is able to outperform famous drives like the Samsung 980 Pro and Hynix Gold P31 and is within striking distance of higher-end drives like the WD SN850, Solidigm P44 Pro and Kingston KC3000. For a QLC drive that's really impressive. Remember, the best QLC drives with Micron QLC, like Crucial P1 and P3, are over 20% slower and sit at the bottom of the M.2 NVMe test group. Samsung only has QLC on the super slow SATA 870 QVO, and there's nothing noteworthy from Hynix. This means that HP FX700 is the fastest QLC SSD on the market and YMTC has achieved performance leadership with their QLC. Still, this doesn't mean that QLC is ready to replace TLC. TLC-based drives like the Lexar NM790, Samsung 990 Pro and others are still able to beat the FX700, especially when you look at specific workloads in our tests.

Thanks to its large pseudo-SLC cache, the FX700 can easily absorb large incoming write bursts. A SLC capacity of 460 GB means that the drive will fill its whole capacity in SLC mode first (480 GB x 4 bits per cell = 1920 GB). This configuration makes a lot of sense, because once the SLC cache is full, write performance falls off a cliff. While 3+ GB/s into the SLC cache is good, 130 MB/s when the SLC cache is full is just terrible. This is typical of QLC, and expected (from a technology perspective). It's still unexpected when your file copy in Windows Explorer drops to such speeds and you realize you'll have to wait much much longer for that operation to complete. Filling the whole 2 TB capacity completed at only 168 MB/s, which is the second-weakest result in our test group, only the Samsung 870 QVO is slower than that. This basically means that you'll never want to run out of SLC cache with these drives, which is easier than it sounds, especially when you're only running typical consumer workloads like Internet browsing, Office productivity and video streaming.

Our power consumption testing confirms that the HP FX700 is an extremely energy-efficient drive, even slightly more efficient than the Lexar NM790. The drive will also properly reach its lowest power state with ASPM enabled, which is important for laptops. Here it will get you more battery life than virtually all SSDs on the market, with the exception of Samsung, which idle a tiny bit lower. Read efficiency is the best we've ever seen, and write efficiency reaches second place, right behind the Lexar NM790—writing to QLC needs a bit more power.

This high energy-efficiency helps the FX700 stay cool. In our thermal stress test we couldn't get the drive to thermally throttle. This test is much more difficult to complete than our previous SSD bench. We're now using a watercooling AIO—like many of you—which means there's only minimal airflow inside the case. HP includes a heat spreader foil on the drive, which is fine. There's mentions of "Graphene," which is more marketing than real science, but it doesn't matter, because the controller, the main heat source, is so efficient.

The HP FX700 is expected to be available in Western markets in early 2024 at a price point of $100 for the tested 2 TB model. While this doesn't sound impressive if you've followed SSD pricing around Black Friday, prices have gone up considerably since then. I've updated pricing for all comparison drives in this review and they all went up. For example the Lexar NM790 sells for $130 now, the WD SN770 is $110, the SN580 2 TB is $100. These are the strongest competitors for the FX700, too. The NM790 is a good deal faster and has TLC memory, which means it won't suffer from a huge loss in write performance when the SLC cache is full. The SN770 is slightly slower than the NM790, but doesn't use Chinese NAND and controller, which some people seem to be really afraid of, while virtually everything in their room is produced in that same country. WD's SN580 is also interesting, because it is one of the most affordable TLC drives on the market, and still offers very good performance. All these options are DRAM-less, which is fine for nearly all usage scenarios these days. If you really want a DRAM cache, then drives like the Samsung 990 Pro ($170), Kingston KC3000 ($140), Solidigm P44 Pro ($135) and WD SN850X ($120) could be options—at higher pricing though. I'm sure we will see more drives based on MAP1602+YMTC QLC soon, and just like the FX700, these are really make or break depending on pricing. They must be substantially cheaper than their TLC counterparts otherwise there is no reason to accept the drawbacks of QLC.