Intel 660p Series M.2 2280 1TB PCIe NVMe 3.0 x4 3D2, QLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) SSDPEKNW010T8X1

Used mainly as a drive for storing resource intensive games. Couldnt be happier with the results. Installed on ASUS H170 board, i7 6700, RTX 2070S. - Load times cut by half or more. Impressive. - Noticeable frame rate increases in nearly all games. - Install was a little goofy. Board was lacking the riser screw to sandwich the end of the card. Had to hunt one down to install. All in all a significant performance bump. Must have for gaming PCs, and great value compared to its performance rivals.

I bought a MacBook Air (early 2015 model) with just 128gb of memory. I finally to a point where that just wasnt enough. I combined this with Sintech NGFF M.2 nVME SSD Adapter Card (the long one, not the short one), and the combination works great. I had a Time Machine backup, and between it and a flashdrive with an iOS installer I was back up again in an hour or two (it only took about ten minutes to swap out the drive; the rest was all reinstalling the iOS and Time Machine backup). So... for less that $100, my MacBook Air has a new lease on life.

I tried to make the Intel Solid State Drive (SSD), 660P Series 1 TB my main internal drive but discovered my motherboard does not support master booting from the PCI Express Port when using an adapter, I therefore went with a SATA 3 SSD, but then found use for the Intel 660P SSD with an SSK Aluminum M.2 NVME SSD Enclosure Adapter (also found on Amazon) and then connected to Xbox One S via USB 3.0 port. Games save and load very quickly. It does get a bit hot inside the enclosure but since I have Gamepass, I really needed the extra storage this SSD provides. Its also very small and can hide behind my Xbox. I recommend the Intel Solid State Drive (SSD), 660P Series 1 TB for multiple uses even if you want to use for a laptop, its small portable and durable.

I owned Intel SSDs before, and never had a problem. I trust Intel for it is a good solid company. The Intel site has complete spec, tutorial and all drivers needed, even for old & outdated products. This M.2 SSD came in an Intel box, installed and Intel web site has very good tutorial, how to initialize and format it. My old SSDs after 5 and 7 years still running in my Pentium and i3 PCs.

Benchmark-wise, this Intel SSD performs decent -- about 1900 MB/s for both read & write. Real world copy test shows about 1100-1300 MB/s for the first 20 or 30 seconds, then it slows down to anywhere from 100 - 350 MB/s. I dont know if its throttling due to temperature or not, but it cannot sustain that 1000+ MB/sec write throughput. Temperature idles around 34-deg C and gets up to 50-deg C during heavy write operations. For the price, it still an excellent buy.

NVMe SSD drives are finally coming down near SATA SSD prices and this unit is a beast for the cost and performance. While not as fast as offerings from Samsung, the 660p drives QLC NAND flash makes up much of the difference by having an additional 240GB SLC cache in front. This cache is a revolving buffer that writes in background to the QLC. Once filled however, you may find files in the 10s or 100s of GBs may slow down at some point but, thats a lot of fast NAND to fill up for the average user. Power users pushing very large video or audio files for editing however may not be as satisfied as they can conceivably run past that cache size and begin writing directly to the QLC NAND. At that point, writes become slower than even the worst SATA SSDs on the market due to QLCs very poor write performance. Drive lifetime is another consideration. From longest to shortest TBW: SLC > MLC > TLC > QLC. QLCs total TBW (Terabytes Written) is about a quarter of MLC I believe, meaning you are sacrificing longevity for cost however even at 400TBW, this will last an average user 3-5 years and those who dont game much or edit media will see longer times. This number however is for the QLC memory only while the SLC will have a longer lifespan. Some percentage of users dont even fill up the 240GB of SLC giving them exceptional value with a drive of this design. In summary, for most users who want fast load times for video games or even just getting into Windows or Linux in seconds, this drive is fast enough that you wont notice the difference between this and a higher performance NVMe SSD. Power users needing the higher initial and sustained throughput of something like Samsungs EVO PRO line may not be as happy with the performance of these QLC drives and should probably stick with TLC/SLC drives. EDIT: Update 1 year later - With the drive a little over half full, Ive used only 13.7 TBW out of 400. I do a ton of gaming on this machine and expected a much higher number. Also, I did finally fun into an issue with the front side SLC cache filling up during a large copy from my RAID but using Intels SSD Toolbox I was able to clear the cache with a single click and bring performance right back up to full speed maxing out my RAIDs read speed at about 420 MB/s. Pros: Price/MB Front-end SLC cache makes it a good performer Cons: Shorter lifespan than other NAND technologies (low TBW) Once exceeding SLC cache, drive can be VERY slow - NOTE: use the Intel SSD Toolbox to clear this periodically and youll be fine.

Going from 5400rpm HDDs to a full PCIe 4x NVMe drive has been a treat. Windows installs and hits the desktop in just a handful of minutes or less. Have bought two of these now and they have both been perfect, fast and have lasted a while. Keep in mind these drives dont have as long as a lifespan as competitors NVMe drives that are another whole $100, but thats my point. If youre not running some kind of NAS or storing precious memories long-term, Id highly recommend this SSD.

I use this as my OS bot disk, but only part of it. the rest is partitioned to work alongside my other drives as extra space. this this is fast and boot time is awesome. PC boots in 4-5 seconds. for the price per gig, this drive is a good deal, even though it changes from time to time, which pisses me off as at times it will increase out of nowhere, but I digress. since it is intel based, you can use it with the migrating software on the intel website to migrate your data and/or OS over to it. Gaming wise, If you are a modder, this drive is good for loading and deploying mods to games fast. the drive has one large tooth and one small tooth, so itll fit inside the slots with only one groove, NOT 2. make sure you check that out before buying for compatibility reasons.

I have a couple of small reservations about this SSD but they have turned out to be pretty insignificant in my use case. The main concern I had with this drive was that it was using QLC flash, which is pretty poor when it comes to write endurance. 200TB TBW for a 1TB drive is really low, but then I had to consider if I would ever reach that limit. Ive been using a Crucial MX300 for the past two years with a very similar endurance rating (220TB) and Ive only used 2% of that in those two years. Unless you have a really write intensive work load (like writing 100+GB every day for five years), then I highly doubt youll ever come close to hitting that limit. Once I realized that my fears of QLC were kind of irrational, I came to the realization that this drive is fantastic for what you pay. Any other 1TB NVMe drive is going to go for anywhere for 2-4x the price, while not providing a lot else in terms of features, speed, or capacity. The only thing you may get by paying more is a higher write endurance (from using TLC or even MLC flash) which I didnt find necessary, and slightly higher read and write speeds (which I also didnt think was important given how fast this drive already is). Overall Id highly recommend this drive to anyone who has a normal workload and wants to experience a significant bump in speed (and probably capacity) without spending a ton.

This is an awesome drive for its price. I used the Sintech adapter to install this drive into an MBP2015, and it worked like a charm. The speed isnt the best on the market, at around 1400MB/s read and 1100~1200MB/s write and I am aware that they achieve this speed by having a small cache and speeds will take a hit if you start moving around big media files, but it provides most of the merits of an NVME drive for a super reasonable price(as of April 2019, the 2TB version is $199.99... and to think I bought my first 256GB Crucial M4 for around $600 where I live!). The reason I took off a star is because very recently they had a driver update, and when I installed the Intel Rapid Storage software, it kinda crashed my drive. Luckily I keep daily backups so I didnt lose any important data, but you might want to keep that in mind and make a backup with whatever software available if you ever update your driver and firmware.