The HP P500 Portable SSD is a great-looking, highly compact drive. Many competitors take the easy route when designing their portable SSDs. They put two PCBs in the case: one that handles the USB-to-NVMe translation and a second that provides the actual storage capacity. Since the latter is often a full-size M.2 SSD, the physical space requirements are bigger. The HP P500 comes in a much smaller footprint because all components have been integrated nicely onto a single PCB. The metal housing is of high quality and ultra-durable. To me, it looks like you could run it over with a truck, probably while reading and writing data from the drive. The beauty of SSDs is that they have no moving parts, which makes them virtually immune against shock, vibration, and other environmental factors.

A USB-C to Type-A cable is included, but the problem is that the cable is way too short. Most desktop computers have their 10 Gbps USB port(s) at the back, so the included cable means you'll be crawling under your desk from time to time. A small criticism is that there is no activity indicator. Many vendors include a small LED near the USB-C port, so you can easily see when the drive is finished with a lengthy copy operation, or when data is accessed.

In terms of performance, the HP P500 really can't impress compared to other USB 3.1 drives in our test group. The underlying reason is that the drive is not based on the NVMe standard, but uses the UFS (Universal Flash Storage) interface, which has been developed for digital cameras, phones, and other consumer electronics devices. Overall performance is still much better than any USB stick or mechanical HDD, reaching almost 400 MB/s read and 250 MB/s write. What's also worth mentioning is that the drive doesn't seem to use any pseudo-SLC cache. This means incoming write bursts can't be absorbed at high speed and instead complete at 250 MB/s. On the other hand, write speeds remain constant while filling the drive's full capacity. Transfer rates on other SSDs fall off a cliff once their SLC cache is exhausted.

With $115 for the 1 TB variant, the HP P500 is about as cheap as it gets for a portable SSD with 1 TB capacity. For the vast majority of consumers, its performance will be perfectly sufficient, especially when interacting with HDD-based systems. On the other hand, for just a few dollars more, you can get an SSD with higher performance, but it might also end up physically bigger because the components aren't integrated as neatly as on the P500.