HP P700 1TB Portable SSD review

We have seen HP (inc) popping up here and there on Amazon listing for storage product lists and we reached out to the company. Turns out that a Chinese company, BIWIN Storage, owns the license for HP in the storage vertical and has produced a number of products that, on paper, appear particularly enticing.

One of their more recent ones is the HP P700, a portable SSD that was launched earlier this year but, at the time of writing, has yet to appear on Amazon, Newegg or any of the usual online retailers that form part of our proprietary Hawk sales system.

(ed: The drive is now available at Newegg for $69.99, $104.99 and $174.99 respectively. We haven't been given any timeline for launches outside the US)

The drive (also known as the 5MS30AA#UUF) is available in black only and in 256GB, 512GB and 1TB capacities; the latter - which we will test today - carries a suggested retail price of U$174.99 with a three-year manufacturer warranty.

Design

The P700 is unlike anything we have seen yet; and it is a compliment. Open the box and you won’t find any loose cable around, only a black box, similar to a jewel box, with slightly rounded edges and measuring around 92 x 65 x 20mm. The top lid is actually the drive itself (it’s a mere 9.2mm thick) and weighs 60g.

The bottom bit - which attaches magnetically - houses a short cable and a USB converter (type-A to type-C), neatly tucked inside. A tidy yet simple way of taking care of the accessories without harming the aesthetics. It bulks up the device slightly although you can decide to leave it behind.

The brush metal finish gives a premium feel to the device and the lack of anything ostentatious adds to this. Even the HP logo is barely noticeable; note that there is no activity light which is a minor letdown. We tried to open the casing as well but without any avail. Minimalist and unserviceable; we don’t mind at all.

 Performance and in use 

The drive gets a bit warm under use but nothing alarming; we found the cable, which measures less than 18cm with the adapter, to be shorter than what we’d be comfortable with.

The P700 supports the newer USB 3.2 Gen 2 (also known as USB 3.1 Gen 1) standard which means that it will reach 10Gbps thanks to the NVMe technology within it. The device is rated at 1050MBps for read and write and under CrystalDiskMark, a popular storage benchmark, it came damn close to these numbers.

At 1046 and 1038MBps on read and write respectively, it is faster than the Samsung T7 Touch, an editor’s choice winner. ATTO is the second of our benchmarking workflow and here we witness peak performance at 999 MB/s read and 994MB/s write. We saw slightly lower numbers in AS SSD and AJA, two other storage test applications.

There’s no software bundled with the P700. As is usually the case, we strongly recommend using a cloud storage service to backup and protect your data against theft and accidents. Since the P700 has a 1TB capacity, even iDrive, which tops our best cloud storage leaderboard, should be sufficient.

Competition

These are testing and trying times and prices of external solid state drives have shot up in the past few weeks due to disrupted supply chains.

If speed is not high on your list, then the Sandisk 1TB Extreme Portable SSD, Samsung T5 or the Seagate Barracuda Fast SSD should be on your list. All of them cost about the same and have a USB 3.1 Gen 2 interface which means that their read/write speeds are far lower than the P700, in some cases, less than half! The aforementioned one even comes with IP55 rating; not totally waterproof but very near.

Three newcomers however have positioned themselves as compelling alternatives thanks to the newer USB 3.2 Gen 2 connector and a keener price point; the Crucial X8 matches the P700 for speed but not for design or size. The Sabrent Rocket Nano is even smaller than HP’s model but comes from a much smaller vendor that some buyers might be unfamiliar with. This leaves us with the Adata SE800 which is not only cheaper but also waterproof (IP68 Rated/MIL-STD-810G 516.6). Perhaps more importantly, it is available right now.

If you need anything faster then you will have to go down the Thunderbolt 3 route and the Samsung X5 or the Plugable Thunderbolt 3 should quench your thirst for speed.

None of them though are as aesthetically eye pleasing as the HP P700.

Final verdict

This is the first HP storage device we tested and truth be said, we were not sure what to expect. BIWIN, the licensee, is an unknown quantity for most reviewers and not exactly what we’d call a household name. 

For all intents and purposes, this is a HP device and there’s no mention of HP’s business partner anywhere on the box. The marketing blurb mentions that it is "Manufactured to HP's high quality standards and fully tested and certified in HP Laboratories". Ironically, HP doesn’t even stock external SSDs on its website and there’s no mention anywhere about the existence of that rather useful range of products.

The HP P700 is certainly one of the better 1TB external solid state drives; sadly, you just can’t buy it and we haven’t received any confirmation as to when it will be widely available. You can now buy it. It is one of the fastest non-Thunderbolt 3 portable SSDs on the market and one that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. True, it is not waterproof like some of its rivals but that is a minor blip in the grander scheme of things.

• Also check our our picks for the best portable drives for your PC or Mac