Package and Contents

Inside the package you will find the SSD itself, a USB Type-C to Type-A cable, and an adapter to convert USB-Type C to Type-A.

The Drive

The HP P700 uses a black metal casing, which looks very clean and sleek. In the first photo, the HP logo and "Portable SSD P700" text are only barely visible, so I took a second photo under different lighting conditions.


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


A single USB-C port lets you connect to the drive. Unlike many other portable SSDs, the HP P700 has no activity LED, which is quite a useful visual indicator for when a transfer is finished or data is accessed.

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. Seeing the small PCB, I do have to wonder why HP decided to make the case bigger than necessary.


On the PCB we find two flash chips, the controller, a DRAM chip, and the PCIe-to-USB bridge chip.


The HP H8098 G AC flash controller looks like a HP model at first look, but is actually a rebranded Silicon Motion SM2263EN controller. This is a 4-channel design with support for PCI-Express Gen 3 x4 and NVMe 1.3.


The two flash chips are rebranded, but definitely come out of Intel/Micron's fab. They are 64-layer 3D TLC NAND, of which each has a capacity of 512 GB. They are identical to those on the HP EX950 SSD.


Unlike nearly all portable SSDs on the market, the HP P700 includes a DRAM chip for the SSD controller to store its mapping tables, which provides a speed advantage, especially for random writes. The chip is made by Micron; D9STQ decodes to MT41K512M16HA-125:A, so 1 GB
at DDR3-1600.


The JMicron's JMS583 controller was one of the first ICs that could handle full-speed USB 3.2 Gen 2 10 Gbps. It supports USB 3.2 Gen 2 on the USB side and PCI-Express x2 3.0 for attached devices.