Package and Contents

The Drive

The HP P500 uses a black metal casing, which looks very clean and sleek. It's also available in three additional colors.


A single USB-C port lets you connect to the drive. Unlike many other portable SSDs, the HP P500 has no activity LED, which is quite a useful visual indicator for when a transfer is finished or data is accessed.


The back has a sticker showing the product name and a bar code.

Disassembly

Taking the drive apart, we see that HP has fully integrated their SSD design onto a single PCB. Other vendors simply put a regular M.2 SSD onto an adapter PCB and stuff that into their external enclosures, which results in a larger physical size.


On the PCB, we find one UFS flash chip, the USB-to-UFS bridge chip, and a USB-C logic chip. Do note the additional three empty solder pads, which means HP ensured they can release the P500 in (much) bigger capacities.


A Samsung KLUGGAR1FA-B2C1 UFS flash chip provides 1 TB of UFS flash storage. UFS is a storage standard designed as an SD memory card replacement, with higher bandwidth and better performance.


The Silicon Motion SM3350 chip isn't really an SSD controller in the classic sense, all that logic is integrated into the Samsung UFS chip, which is like its own self-contained SSD. What the SM3350 does is translate between the UFS interface the Samsung chip speaks and the USB interface used to connect to the main system.


The eVer / Etron EJ179V chip is a single-chip solution for a USB-C interface implementation. It handles mapping the signal lines for the Type-C reversible connector, oversees power management, and can detect and configure itself for USB 3.1 Gen 1 or Gen 2.