Ok thanks, sounds fair to me, an Arduino digital pin

 

if I don't use a gate driver will that not affect the FET's ton and toff?

Yes. It will affect the turn on and off times. I have some circuits where I am running 500khz and the gate is turned on /off by 5 amps. For the power bricks in automotive drive control, we are using 10A.
At your 500hz, don't worry about it. I would not go below 10mA drive. Don't use a 10k resistor.

 

At 500Hz 10% (0.2mS ON time) duty cycle your Ton/Toff times are irrelevant as your MOSFET is hardly going to do anything with that inductor as a load - if you see 300mA drain current you'll be lucky. What exactly are you trying to do?

 

Simulation with a common logicFET, the IRFZ44N. The voltage source V2 plus the two 20mA current sources I1 & I2 is a reasonable facsimile of an Arduino GPIO output. As you can see, the L/R time constant of that inductor doesn't allow the drain current to get much above 200mA in 0.2mS. The MOSFET only dissipates 14mW across 2 cycles, showing that Ton & Toff are irrelevant, there's hardly any switching losses.



Close up of turn on & turn off. The drain current spike is various capacitances in the MOSFET charging up. Though the drain voltage takes a couple of microseconds to drop off, the current through L1 is zero so the only significant switching loss is due to those internal capacitances. In the turn off phase there are virtually no switching losses. As the drain volts rise the current through L1 remains constant as it discharges its energy through the diode D1 so drain current drops to zero virtually instantly.