HP P700 1TB Portable SSD
An intriguing new piece of technology appears on our radar.
We have seen HP (inc) popping up here and there on Amazon listings 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.
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 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.
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”.
The HP P700 is certainly one of the better 1TB external solid state drives; sadly, you just can’t buy it easily, and we haven’t received any confirmation as to when it will be widely available. 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.
The HP P700 is a stunning piece of technology, a worthy editor’s choice winner and one to look forward to. It delivers a speedy performance at a relatively low cost and earns added cookie points for its ingenious cable management system.
At 1046 and 1038MBps on read and write respectively, it is faster than the Samsung T7 Touch, an editor’s choice winner.