HP is, of course, better known for its printers and PCs, but the company also maintains a low-key stable of flash storage. With its utilitarian Portable SSD P500 (starts at $74.99 for 500GB; $109.99 for the 1TB model we tested), the company brings the go-anywhere portability, sturdy design, and snappy speeds of today's external SSDs to its budget-line offerings. It may be a subpar performer for gaming (and when compared to cutting-edge external SSDs like Seagate FireCuda Gaming SSD), but this SSD will do a workable job under normal usage conditions and comes with a decent three-year warranty. It doesn't do much to separate itself from the pack on price, performance, or design versus contenders from ADATA, Crucial, Samsung, and WD, but it's a perfectly serviceable pick if you find it on sale.

The Design: Speed Metal

HP offers the P500 in three storage capacities: 250GB, 500GB and 1TB. (The 250GB was not generally available in the U.S. at the time I wrote this.) You'll pay around 15 cents per gigabyte for the 500GB model and almost 11 cents per gigabyte for 1TB. The 1TB model would be the best bet for raw cost-per-gig value. (HP does not cite an MSRP for these drives, so prices are from Amazon, per an HP's rep's suggestion.)

At 10.9 cents per gigabyte for the 1TB model, the P500 is cheaper than other also-basic external SSDs we've reviewed, like the Patriot PXD Portable SSD. The P500 at the smaller 500GB capacity is a bit more expensive, but it's not out of line with other drives that size.

This SSD's chassis is smaller than a business card and could, in theory, fit in a wallet (albeit not recommended). The P500 measures 0.39 by 2.1 inches by 3.1 inches (HWD) and weighs only 2.1 ounces. It's one of the smallest external SSD chassis out there that's not in a USB-stick form.

The drive comes in matching minimal packaging with a USB Type-C-to-A cable, a USB Type-A-to-C adapter, and a manual. The drive proper has a USB-C port for accepting the cable.

The drive has a minimalist design, with HP's logo on one side and the name on the other. Black, silver, red, and blue chassis options are available. HP also offers a sibling SSD, the Portable SSD P700, which is slightly bigger and rated for faster reads and writes. Apart from the slight size variance, there's no difference visually between the two.

Testing the Portable SSD P500: Ordinary Serial ATA Speeds

The Portable SSD P500 uses a Silicon Motion SM3350 controller paired with Samsung NAND chips. The internals of this drive are based on Serial ATA, as opposed to PCI Express, so the performance ceiling, we suspect, will be pretty predictable. It supports USB 3.1 Gen2 speeds over USB Type-C or Type-A, and it works with Windows, macOS, and Linux. There's no software preloaded on the SSD, such as a drive cloning/duplication utility or any maintenance software. This is as basic as SSDs come.

We ran our usual suite of SSD tests on the Portable SSD P500, comprising Crystal DiskMark 6.0, UL's PCMark 10 Storage, BlackMagic's Disk Speed Test, and our own folder transfer test. The first two are run on a PC with the drive formatted in NTFS, and the latter two on a 2016 MacBook Pro using exFAT. 

The performance is far from chart-topping but is fine for most users in casual, everyday use. Any difference between it and a PCI Express-based model is likely to be modest when transferring small files. (As an example, the 1TB Portable SSD P500, on our folder copy test, did a folder-to-folder copy of our sample 1.2GB folder in 6 seconds.) But expect to feel the slower speeds if you're a gamer, or when copying or reading very large files and folders. This drive is slow even for a SATA-based model, though it will still feel decisively faster than a hard drive.

HP rates the 250GB and 500GB versions of the drive for sequential read speeds up to 380MBps, and for sequential writes up to 200MBps. The 1TB version we tested is rated for a higher 420MBps and 268MBps respectively, but our tests show it slower at most times than its competitors, even value drives like the ADATA SE800. It will be faster than any portable hard drive, but it's basic at best for an external SSD in 2020.

Verdict: A Thoroughly Average External SSD

The bottom line? The P500 has a nice design and comes at a competitive cost per gigabyte. The SSD is fine for most everyday use, but we wouldn't recommend it for constant, heavy large-file or -folder reads or writes, if that is mostly what you do.

If speed is your main criterion, go with a model with a USB 3.2 Gen 2-capable interface and PCI Express-based innards, such as the Crucial X8 or Seagate FireCuda Gaming SSD. If you can get the P500 at a rock-bottom price depending on the reseller, though, it should serve you well enough if all you need is basic storage—and you are patient.

HP Portable SSD P500 Specs