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

I installed the 2 TB SSD in place of the OEM 128 GB original to my laptop using a Sintech adapter. I initialized this to APFS and created 2 volumes in a single container. One volume currently runs Mojave 10.14.6 and the other runs Catalina 10.15.1. I have had no problem with either MacOS in this configuration for two months of use. I can now clone my Catalina running desktop to my laptop for travel. And as a benefit I can also boot Mojave to run some older software I still currently need to access. An inexpensive way to breed new life into my older laptop.

Let me start off by saying that I bought this particular SSD because I wanted an SDD with 2TB of capacity and triple the speeds of a normal Sata 3 interface and this drive does exactly what I wanted it to do and more! I had to purchase a YATENG PCIe add in card since my HP z420 Workstation doesnt natively support an M.2 NVME SSD and I wanted an SSD that would get triple the speeds of an average Sata 3 SSD with all of my Steam and Uplay Games installed on a secondary drive. I consistently get over 1,500 MBs Read/Write with speeds up to 3.3 MBs at times before throttling down as the SSD heats up; but I have NEVER been below 1,500 MBs EVER with this SSD! My load times for my games are now between 3-7 seconds depending on the game; instead of the typical long load times I got from a Sata 3 SSD or even an Enterprise Class HD! Anyone that has DIED in a game and had to wait for it to reload again knows what I am talking about! For the performance I get from this drive even after having to purchase an add in card to use it; compared to a Sata 3 SSD that costs 2x the price still suffering from the Sata bottleneck, this is a no-brainier to me!

This drive is outstanding for general everyday use. I use it to store my Steam library, movie collection, photos, and a lot of archival backups and that sort of thing so it has worked great for me for the past 3 months. I bought this drive because my new laptop doesnt have slot for big 2.5 mechanical drives and instead only has 2 NVMe slots. I chose a fast SLC NVMe SSD (Samsung 970 Evo) as my primary boot drive to get stupid-fast speeds for my operating system + apps and then chose this Intel 660p SSD as my storage drive where I keep the rest of my bigger files that dont necessarily need to be accessed ludicrously-fast. Dont get me wrong, this is still a very speedy drive and its served me very well and I have no complaints, but remember that youre buying this to get a huge amount of storage at a really good price (for NVMe SSDs anyways). Other 2TB NVMe SSDs can be twice as expensive. The value is the amount of storage, not the performance or longevity. Thats the benefit of this drive. You will get pretty good read and write speeds, especially with relatively smaller files (a couple GB) but once the SLC cache fills up performance will dip substantially (see screenshots). Writing files that are several hundred MB or a couple GB usually goes very fast, but bigger files will slow down after the initial burst. This drive can be great, but just consider how youll be using this. You can probably use it as your boot drive and install Windows just fine, but thats not the ideal use case of this drive in my opinion.

Updeat - 2 yeas of use and not one problem. Moved to external device and then to a new computer and it still works perfectly. Works well so far. Write and read speeds are good for such an inexpensive NVME. Speed drops after the first few GBs to a steady 600 MBS. Tested on old 990FX with FX8370 cpu in a Pcie 2.0x4 slot. If I remember to update this rating and it is still working in six months it will get all five stars. Compared to regular SSDs this is a great bargain.

I got this for some data that has directories with 10s of thousands of files in some of the directories. A standard spinning disk takes minutes to return a search result in the application that manages that data. Years ago I moved to a 500 gig ssd that took search times to just 5 second or so for the same search. Then I moved to a 1 tb ssd running at about 450 and with the increased number of files still maintained the 5 second search time. I was just running out of room on the 1tb drive and wanted to increase performance as well as capacity and I found this on sale for under 200 dollars. Its not as fast as a Samsung NVME but even at about 1/3 the speed its still 2+ times faster than an ssd. I put it in a aftermarket pcie card on my desktop and copied the almost terabyte of data over and though I was going to melt it down. Even with an heat sink it got to hot to touch and data transfer dropped to under 20mbs. It took a long time to copy the data. However once that was done and it cooled down speeds rose back to 1000mbs and my normal data transfers to it of a few mb to maybe a gig at the time run blazingly fast and searches come back in maybe 4 seconds now. It wasnt as big of a jump in performance as I wanted but it was significant and at the price which was less than the standard 2tb samsung ssd I looked at it has done stellar duty.. Its been in daily use for about 6 months now.

I wanna start by saying that I did not buy this as a drive for my operating system. Mostly all of my storage is solid state with the exception of a single 2TB hard disk that I was using as an overflow for games. It wasnt able to load large games quickly at all and took forever. So I upgraded to this solid state drive and it’s been worlds better. This solid state drive is not anywhere near as fast as others, especially Samsung nvme drives as well as the new PCIe gen4 ones but when it comes to game load times you won’t notice any difference between this and those but this is still faster and a SATA based SSD. My only complaint is that for the slower speed this thing runs crazy hot. Overall the price you pay for the 2TB version is a great deal and I would definitely buy another one for one of my other systems when I need more storage on one of them.

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

This is the second SSD drive I have used, the other I could not tell you the make or model (inside a work PC) but after having used a PC with this M.2 SSD, I find it hard and frustrating to use anything else (including the work PC that has an older version/style SSD). The drive is stupid fast! Install progress bars open then quickly snap shut (in a great way) because they complete so fast! I have NEVER seen boot times like I do now! I swear it takes me longer to enter my password than it does to come up to a ready working state! Buy more than just one!!

Prior to this SSD drive, I had a SanDisk 960 GB SATA SSD M.2 drive. I am transferring files at ~200-400 MB/s with that drive, but this Intel M.2 NVMe SSD blows it out of the water. I would personally say this is in between the speeds of SATA SSDs and high-end NVMe SSDs since I was getting benchmark speeds of ~ 1.4 GB/s. It was super easy to install on Windows 10 Pro 64 bit OS on an Alienware 17 R3 laptop, and I plan on transferring this drive to a new laptop in the future once the 9th gen Intel processors release to retain data. Keep in mind that this isnt a glorified Samsung Pro series NVMe SSD, but it definitely raises brows amongst the tech community in terms of value and performance. At a rated 200 TB TBW, this NVMe drive will go a long way. Lets say I transferred 10GB of data daily... That means I would be writing 3.65 TB of files a year making this theoretically capable of lasting about 55 years. Realistically, I plan to replace this drive after 5 years of use due to the exponential advancement in tech... In the meantime, this is the best deal you can get from a reliable company in regards to speed, reliability, endurance, and value. Overall, this makes a perfect storage drive for content creators, gamers, or tech enthusiasts looking for value and performance.

It is great for its price and ability to perform with stability, overall the speeds are normal for an nvme SSD, nvme uses the pcie interface so it is faster than a sata, if you want a reliable and budget gaming/editing ssd look no further.