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

Updated: So I went ahead and bought a pci-e adapter (once I realized I could do that) and put this drive in that instead of my z97 board (which you can see in 1st benchmark limits it to about 800mb/sec). Now it reads at up to 1.6GB/sec and writes up to 1.9GB/sec. Well worth the $16 adapter for that speed. Windows 10 immediately recognized it as the same drive with no drivers or any hassle. adapter I bought: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N78XZCH/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 Original: This 2TB drive hits a nice middle ground of speed, size and price per GB (paid 204). I installed it on an older (i7 4790K) system with a Z97 chipset. The MSi (motherboard) website didnt list this m2 drive but it works great despite that. Installation was simple, inserted/screwed it into place, turned on PC and just had to initialize it in the windows disk manager. Thankfully, my main board already had a (tiny!) screw in the m2 slot. Nothing comes with the drive. This drive is limited by my pci-e bandwidth but is still pretty quick. The average write is over 700mb/sec and the average read is around 800mb/sec. Thats quite a bit faster than all my 2.5 SSDs (which reach about 500-530mb/sec) These m2 drives can get hot so I added a $6 m2 heatsink before installing. I removed the Intel sticker from the top and re-stuck it to the back of the drive for better thermal contact. That sticker peels right off once you get it started. Heatsink: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B078X8WCY2/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I bought the 2TB model. The installation was simple; just make sure your board has the right M-Key M2 slot. I just turned off the computer, put this drive in, booted up, and went to the computer management portion in Windows to partition and format it. It was a very easy and fast process. It should be noted this drive uses QLC memory, which is the worst and cheapest. If you are doing a database workload or will utilize heavy writes, like writing 200GB+ files regularly, you wont be happy. If you plan to use this as a drive to store applications such as games, youll be quite happy. This drive has a decently sized SLC cache, so as long as the file writes dont get large and frequent, itll make the drive overall fast enough; by that I mean 2GB/s or very close to it. If the writes are large and frequent, this drive will be slow. If that is your workload...pay for it with an appropriate drive. My use case is a drive to store all of my games. With many being over 50GB now, you need a big drive if you have lots of games like I do. For this purpose, the drive is outstanding in terms of value. It delivers great performance in the use case of reading all those textures and feeding the RAM and CPU. If you want to use this as a boot drive, you can. It will work well in this case, but there are better options if you want outstanding performance. Still, this is a big upgrade if youre using a magnetic disk or old SSD. As to the durability of QLC, if your use case is application storage, this really shouldnt be anything to worry about. Unless youre doing very high write workloads, the SSD will last a long time. I have a 10 year old Intel SSD, and the Intel tool says it is only 10% through its life, and I used that as an OS drive for many many years.

I purchased this little gem to replace the SSD in my Predator Helios 300. The 256 GB drive was just a little too small for my liking and I was constantly swapping games to and from the mechanical storage so Id have fast loading for whatever I was playing at the time. I needed more storage on my SSD. Enter the Crucial MX500. Good speed, good reliability, and at a reasonable price. I was ready to hit buy, then I saw the Intel 660p was on sale for the same price. A faster drive, with 12 GB more storage. I figured, why not... and have been happy since. I think this is a great product for a great price. If you can nab it on sale, go for it. Youll be happy with it.

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.

The capacity is very good and the speed good too. My only complaint is the mounting it requires a very small special screw. It should be included with the board. I had to order the screw after realizing I did not have the appropriate screw. Now I have 15 of the special screws and will lose them before I find a need for them.

Installed this on a gigabyte B450M dsh AM4 with an RX580 radeon 8gb gts xxx video card and Ryzen 5 2600x. First new build in a few years, with 32 gb ram, and it seems like an instant startup! Less than 10 seconds from bios blankscreen! Installed windows 10 in less than 10 minutes, so the transfer speeds on this are great! Normally it takes 30 minutes to install a game, but with this, the game installs less then 15 same game! Just amazing speed!

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.

Much improved gaming experiences since the M.2 works best with my MSI chipset and 2081Ti video card.

I just installed one of these in my sons computer to get him off of an 512GB SSD. I was pleasantly surprised by how quickly Win 10 loaded and ran, pretty much the same as my faster nvme drive. My Samsung 970 EVO may be faster on paper, but at half the price, this is good enough to be recommended for everyone. I find 1TB to be the sweet spot as I have yet to fill it up on my computer. I bought another for my other sons machine. Get them while they are still around $120. And yes, I had to root around in my screw bag for the stupid little screw to anchor it down, heh.

Im putting this review in the spirit of NVMe drives. I dont have any issues with this drive vs. what I expected of it. Works great; highest temp I have seen under heavy operation is 60C. However; if you have a write operation; read tends to get blocked. I cant unpack a 10GB gz tarball while listening to music on the same drive without experiencing (~20 sec) buffering. And that is after I left 500GiB unallocated space as suggested in the comments to give space for caching. From what I understand; this is not a real NVMe drive; but a more superpowered SSD sort of deal; but I am more software rather than hardware person so i dont know how useful or true that statement is. Excellent choice for home folder drive; but I suggest a better performing NVMe for an OS partition. Extreme bang for your buck; I got this when it was on prime and 185$. I would say you should go for better options for 250$; as you can find similar 1TB NVMes around the same price point; but better performance. I would really rate this 10/10 and would buy it again (like 2 times) for the same price. Excellent drive for data storage. Not as fast as advertised though, and has the simultaneous read/write issues; so takes off a star since this is in the nvme department. EDIT: Just thought to mention that I use encryption; and read was not an mp3 but a minimally compressed flac file. So in general; higher load than what average users would expect out of these operations.