HP's new P700 Portable SSD looks great because of its high-quality metal shell and a color theme that will universally fit, be it on a CEO desk, a creative's workbench, or in a gaming cave. It is roughly the same size as a 2.5" SATA SSD, which makes it a medium-sized portable SSD. There are models that are smaller, but also bigger. Looking at the disassembly photos, it looks a bit like a lost opportunity to me as the PCB inside the metal case is barely using half the space available, not sure why. What I do have to praise HP for is that they designed their own PCB for the P700 and didn't just use a USB-to-PCIe bridge PCB with a standard M.2 SSD plugged in.

A USB-C to Type-A cable is included, and using the included adapter, you can also get USB-C to USB-C connectivity. The problem with those cables is that they are 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 several times. Another little thing to criticize 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.

HP's P700 delivers impressive benchmark results that are better than any other portable SSD we've tested so far. Even at low queue depths, transfer rates are very high—better than what any SATA SSD can achieve, and of course much faster than any mechanical HDD. Only 512K sequential mixed performance is surprisingly low—this test case represents copying a large file from the SSD to the same SSD. Speeds suffer greatly in this scenario, which is fairly uncommon, though. A feature worth highlighting is that the HP P700 comes with a DRAM cache chip, which stores the SSD flash mapping table. The mapping table translates between physical disk addresses (as seen by the OS) and the actual location of where the data is stored in the flash chips: "which chip, at which location." Using DRAM has a speed advantage as it operates much faster than flash, but it's a cost/performance trade-off. A 1 TB SSD typically uses 1 GB of DRAM, which costs a few dollars.

If you plan on installing games or applications directly onto the SSD, the P700 would be my first choice. This also means it should be one of the best options on the market to expand your gaming console's storage. Large-scale sequential write performance is good, too, better than any other portable SSD we've tested. If you're writing a ton of data in one go, transfer rates will go down a bit, but in a much more well-behaved way than other SSDs. The drop is mostly gradual, and speeds recover quickly.

With $175 for the 1 TB variant, pricing of the HP P700 is reasonable, especially if you consider its performance and the fact that it has DRAM cache, which increases production cost, too. Still, there are lots of competitors in this segment—the Crucial X8 which uses QLC flash, but retails for around $150, for example. Also worth mentioning are super-cheap $99 portable SSDs, which are much slower, of course, but could be sufficient for your usage scenario. Last but not least, you also have the option to buy a standard M.2 NVMe SSD and install it in a USB-to-M.2 enclosure yourself, at similar pricing. Overall, the HP P700 is one of the best choices on the market if you are looking for excellent performance in an external SSD and can afford spending an extra $20.