HP P700 Portable SSD Review: Clever Cable Management

While portable HDDs offer the best bang for your buck storage in terms of cost per GB, even the best external hard drives are much slower and more prone to damage than SSDs. Starting at just $69, the HP P700 portable SSD provides a strong 10 Gbps USB-C connection and solid performance at a reasonable price. 

In addition to its solid performance, the HP P700 offers a unique way to store its wire and adapter: a magnetic tray that snaps onto the bottom of the drive and secures these necessary-accessories while you travel.  Unfortunately for business users, it does not offer hardware-based AES encryption.

HP P700 Specifications

HP offers the P700 in three colors: black, red, and blue in capacities of 256GB, 512GB and 1TB. Overall, they are priced quite competitively at $69.99, $104.99, and $174.99 and come backed by a 3-year warranty  Backed by a three-year warranty. the HP P700 features a USB 3.2 Gen 2 interface that promises sequential speeds of up to 1,000 MBps and hits upwards of 78,000/73,000 IOPS read/write in random operations. It comes preformatted as exFAT, but can be formatted for whatever file system supports your workflow best. We formatted the HP P700 as NTFS for Trim support when testing in Windows 10.

Software and Accessories on HP P700

HP ships the P700 with a 6-inch USB Type-C cable and a USB Type-C male to Type-A female adapter. You can place these pieces in a storage box that attaches to the bottom of the SSD itself with magnets as part of the overall product design.

Design and Components of HP P700

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HP’s P700 lacks a power indicator light as well as a rubber grip to hold it in place on smooth surfaces. HP’s P700 measure 92 x 65 x 9.2mm without the magnetic storage box and is about 21mm thick when the storage box is attached. The portable SSD weighs about 58g alone or about 102g with the included accessories. 

Structurally, the HP P700’s casing is metal on top and plastic on the bottom side that holds the magnets and PCB in place. The company ensured the design was small and lightweight, but while small compared to an HDD, it could have been considerably smaller based on the internal hardware design. Inside is a small PCB with only a few components overall. 

Managing the host interaction is a JMicron JMS583 USB 3.1 Gen2 to PCIe 3.0 x2 bridge controller that supports UASP, Trim, and S.M.A.R.T. data reporting pass through. At the heart of the PCB is an HP-branded Silicon Motion SM2263EN PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe 1.3 SSD controller. The controller is a dual-core ARM Cortex design that is built on a 28nm process and utilizes a DRAM cache to operate. For that task, the device features a 1GB chip of Micron’s DDR3 DRAM. 

The SM2263EN SSD controller has 4-channels / 4 CE (Chip Enables) per channel that interface with sixteen of Intel’s 512Gb 64L TLC NAND flash that were binned and packed by Biwin Inc. It utilizes Silicon Motions NANDXtend ECC Technology (LDPC ECC) and features end-to-end data path protection to ensure data integrity. But, while these pieces of hardware are feature-packed, the HP P700 lacks an important feature for business users, hardware-based AES 256-bit full drive encryption to keep your data secure.