875595-B21 HPE 800GB PCI-E x4 NVMe MLC SSD

HPE 875595-B21 800GB SFF SSD Overview

The HPE 875595-B21 800GB SFF Mixed-Use PCI-Express 3.0 X4 (nvme) Hot Swap SC Digitally Signed Firmware Solid State Drive for Proliant Gen9 And Gen10 Servers occupies a focused but mission-critical niche in enterprise storage: high-reliability, mid-capacity NVMe flash storage designed for mixed workload profiles in HPE ProLiant environments. This category centers on small form factor (SFF) NVMe devices that combine enterprise-grade endurance, advanced firmware management, and full hot-swap support for dense server deployments. The HPE 875595-B21 is representative of the mixed-use tier, where peak performance and consistent I/O are balanced with endurance characteristics suitable for virtualization hosts, boot and OS volumes, transactional databases, caching layers, and mixed read/write application footprints.

Mixed-Use

The mixed-use SFF NVMe category is defined by drives capable of handling diverse workloads — neither strictly read-intensive nor write-heavy — while providing predictable latency and throughput in multi-tenant or consolidated server environments. Drives in this category, including the HPE 875595-B21 800GB model, are built to integrate tightly with HPE ProLiant Gen9 and Gen10 servers, delivering compatibility with HPE firmware provisioning, secure boot and digitally signed firmware mechanisms, and the management features that enterprise administrators expect from HPE-branded components. These drives are optimized for use as primary server storage in environments where balance between capacity, cost, and endurance is a priority rather than raw single-threaded peak throughput alone.

Technical

The HPE 875595-B21 design emphasizes the small form factor footprint, leveraging SFF mechanics and an NVMe PCIe 3.0 x4 interface to deliver high IOPS density inside HPE server chassis. The SFF designation reduces bay space and enables higher drive counts per chassis, which is critical in dense compute deployments where maximizing storage per U is a priority. The PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe interface provides four lanes of PCI Express connectivity, enabling significant parallelism for command queues and reducing host-side CPU overhead compared with older SATA or SAS interfaces. For administrators, this means simpler cabling and host integration while gaining the latency and throughput benefits of NVMe technology.

Hot-Swap

Enterprise-grade hot-swap support is integral to the category: drives are designed to be inserted and removed while servers remain powered and operational, enabling fast replacement and minimal maintenance windows. The HPE 875595-B21 includes hot-swap readiness and mechanical compatibility with ProLiant drive backplanes, ensuring that service technicians can replace failed units quickly without entering extended downtime windows. Hot-swap capability also facilitates rolling refresh strategies and easy scalability for evolving capacity needs.

Digitally Signed Firmware

Digitally signed firmware is a notable attribute of the HPE 875595-B21 and similar units within the category, reflecting the importance of supply chain integrity and runtime firmware validation in enterprise environments. Digitally signing firmware protects servers from tampered images and unauthorized firmware modifications, and it integrates with HPE tooling to ensure that only validated firmware versions are deployed. This reduces the risk of malicious firmware, prevents accidental mismatches, and streamlines compatibility verification when rolling out firmware updates across many servers. For security-conscious deployments, the digitally signed firmware model is a critical differentiator.

Performance

Within the mixed-use NVMe category, performance is evaluated across metrics such as steady-state random I/O, sequential throughput, latency at various queue depths, and write endurance under mixed-access patterns. Drives like the HPE 875595-B21 are calibrated to deliver consistent low-latency performance for small block random reads and writes while maintaining good sequential throughput for larger transfers. This balanced performance makes the category suitable for boot volumes, hypervisor storage, application servers, moderate OLTP databases, email systems, and caching layers for larger storage arrays.

IOPS

Predictable IOPS and low tail latency are hallmarks of enterprise NVMe SFF mixed-use drives. The category emphasizes minimizing latency spikes under sustained mixed I/O, which is especially important for virtualization hosts where multiple guest VMs share a single physical device. Engineers and operators choose mixed-use NVMe drives to reduce I/O variability and to meet service-level objectives for diverse workloads without overspending on higher endurance or ultra-high-performance tiers that might be unnecessary for the use case.

Endurance

Endurance metrics such as terabytes written (TBW) and drive writes per day (DWPD) are central to the mixed-use category’s value proposition. These drives are specified with endurance levels that match moderate write profiles while delivering years of service under typical enterprise utilization. Proper lifecycle planning aligns drive capacity, endurance, and workload patterns to avoid premature wear-out and to maximize return on investment. The HPE 875595-B21 800GB capacity provides an attractive sweet spot between per-drive usable space and cost efficiency for many server-class deployments.

Compatibility

Compatibility with HPE ProLiant Gen9 and Gen10 servers is a key purchasing consideration and the raison d’être for this category label. Drives sold for these platforms carry firmware and hardware compatibility guarantees, and they integrate with HPE management ecosystems including iLO, HPE Smart Storage Administrator, and server firmware update frameworks. Administrators benefit from unified hardware inventory, health monitoring, predictive failure analytics and firmware update workflows that are validated by HPE for the specific server generations referenced.

Deployment

Use cases for the HPE 875595-B21 and its category peers span many enterprise scenarios. Virtualization hosts running many small VMs require drives that deliver consistent random I/O at low latency. Container platforms and CI/CD runners that continually read/write small files also fit the mixed-use profile. Application servers that require fast metadata access and transactional responsiveness, such as email systems, web application backends, and light-to-medium OLTP databases, will often find the mixed-use SFF NVMe category a cost-effective choice. Hybrid storage architectures leverage mixed-use NVMe drives as caching or tiering layers in front of larger capacity HDD or SATA/SAS arrays, accelerating read-mostly workloads without incurring the per-GB cost of all-flash arrays.

Optimizing

To get the most from mixed-use SFF NVMe drives, administrators should align drive capacity and endurance to the observed write patterns, employ monitoring to detect changes in workload behavior, and configure server-level storage policies that prevent pathological write amplification. Combining mixed-use drives with software-defined storage caching, tiering, or deduplication technologies can increase effective usable capacity while offloading peak I/O bursts from backend storage. When implementing RAID or erasure coding across NVMe drives, careful attention to rebuild times and rebuild impact is important; mixed-use drives reduce rebuild stress compared with lower-endurance options but still require planning to maintain availability during maintenance events.

Comparisons

Within HPE’s portfolio and the broader NVMe market, products are commonly differentiated by endurance (read-intensive vs mixed-use vs write-intensive), capacity, form factor (M.2, SFF, U.2), interface generation (PCIe 3.0 vs PCIe 4.0), and firmware/security features. The HPE 875595-B21 800GB SFF Mixed-Use drive sits in a middle ground: more robust than read-optimized devices, more cost-efficient than high-DWPD write-intensive models, and targeted at ProLiant Gen9 and Gen10 server owners who require validated compatibility and HPE-specific management features. For buyers comparing options, the decision often reduces to matching endurance to workload, ensuring firmware compatibility with server firmware versions, and considering the value of vendor-backed firmware signing and integrated support.

Choosing between Mixed-Use and other

When selecting between mixed-use and other endurance tiers, evaluate the ratio of write to read operations, average write size, and the presence of workload burstiness. Mixed-use is appropriate for balanced workloads and for environments where capacity density matters. For write-heavy logging platforms or analytics ingestors, higher endurance write-optimized drives may be worth the premium. Conversely, for large-scale content delivery or archival read-heavy applications, read-intensive drives provide cost savings. The HPE 875595-B21 is chosen when predictability and a balance between cost and endurance are prioritized, and when ProLiant-grade firmware validation is required.