Introduction

HP, aka Hewlett Packard, is one of the most well-known tech companies in the world. They produce nearly every product you can think of: laptops, desktops, printers, enterprise hardware, and solid-state drives.

We’ve previously reviewed the HP P700 Portable SSD, which impressed with outstanding performance and high transfer rates. Today’s review is for the HP P500 Portable SSD, which is a much more cost affordable design for people who aren’t as focused on performance.

The HP P500 is actually produced by HP business partner BIWIN Storage, a large Chinese OEM for SSD solutions with 25 years of experience in the storage and microelectronics business. They were granted authorization from HP to produce SSDs in their name. Internally, the HP P500 is built using a UFS flash chip paired with the appropriate glue chips and USB interface. UFS is a highly popular storage standard with cell phones, tablets, and digital cameras. It was invented as a high-performance alternative to SD memory cards for multi-gigabit transfer rates.

The HP P500 uses a UFS 2.1 compatible storage chip from Samsung, which means it’s not the latest revision 3.1, so slower speeds are expected. For external connectivity, HP opted for the fast USB 3.1 Gen 2 interface, which is handled by a Silicon Motion SM3350 controller acting as a USB-to-UFS bridge. In a move typical for most portable SSDs, the P500 does not include a DRAM cache chip.

We review the HP P500 in the 1 TB variant, which retails for $115, but it is also available in capacities of 250 GB (price unknown) and 500 GB ($75). Warranty is set to three years for all these models. The HP P500 is available in four colors.