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

By far the best value on the market. Windows 10 boots literally in three seconds, not the 10 minutes of my old computer with a mechanical HD. I bought the 1 terabyte version for my initial build but plan on buying the 2 terabyte version for additional storage. Some drives such as the 970 series from Samsung have a better durability and speed rating, however, durability should never be a factor unless one abuses by swapping vast amounts of data back and forth, and speed is still extraordinarily fast when used normally. I’ve been using the computer to play simple computer games, burning DVDs, and for word processing; all with remarkable loading speeds that far exceed my expectations.

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.

So much faster than my SATA SSDs, and cheaper. My Dell XPS 8900 had a spare M.2 slot on the motherboard, so I initially installed there and performance was good. I then bought a $20 PCI card to mount the drive, and thats when the speed went crazy fast (1800 MB/s) compared to 450 MB/s for my Samsung EVO on SATA. Intel has good installation instructions on their website. You have to install Windows 10 from a jump drive before running the disk cloning program.

I bought the 2TB Intel 660p NVMe SSD, new, from Amazon Services, Inc. (not an other seller). Reviews indicate it has an OK buffer size, with SamSung and even HP a little better. However, the price is stellar, and its still faster at any of its speeds than my prior device. I was a little worried because of some claims that their new device was mislabeld. The package I received had the safety tape cut already. I was worried. I inspected closely, and everything was correct. No fingerprints, no damage. When I installed the device, it said power cycles 2, power-on hours 0. Hardware ID is Intel SSDPEKNW020T8, and size is 2 TiB. Now that my concerns were assuaged, I used Macrium to clone. Cloning from my old drive pushed 430GBytes in 45 minutes. Macrium claimed 1.3GB/sec. Swapped the device, and re-enabled BitLocker, reinstalled Steam, etc. So far, performance is great. Its been 3 days, and backups are fast, games load fast, etc. I was on NVMe before, so I didnt expect to notice any difference. I do. Its not as much as the difference from HDD to SSD, but it is like the difference between SATA and NVMe. So, as a reminder, every few years, check performance for the next generation of SSDs. If your system supports it, and you run any demanding workloads (VirtualBox/VMWare, gaming, etc), then consider an upgrade. UPDATE 2020-02-07: the performance is still about the same. 7300-7900 read iops and 9-15k write iops. Bumping up the queue depth brings that into the 30-90k range. Throughput is int eh 1300-1500 range on read, and 790-1700 range on sequential writes.

1tb solid state drive with 600MBps+ read/write. 1/3 the price of the latest generation drives. Its a no brainier for Even the most savvy gamer. Last generation nvme drives are overkill for any consumer application or game. You can save money, receive plenty of usage time out of these 600 series drives. I didnt see any reason to have read/write speed of the latest generation samsung drives since nothing I use requires it and you wont notice if your game loads 2 miliseconds faster. FPS in games arent really impacted by read/write speeds so again save a little cash on the drive and get a better graphics card. If you want to get the latest generation drive to futureproof your system you may want to realize each drive has a limited number or writes to each block. All solid state drives will eventually wear out. The drive may wear out before you have an application that requires the higher speeds you get with the latest generation nvme drive.

Yosemite operating system would not recognize the drive, had to upgrade to high sierra, creating USB boot drive was the most difficult part of the process. Had to use dosdude1 to download the full version. Now have a macbook air with 2TB of storage. Sintech NGFF M.2 nVME SSD Adapter is what I used to install this. I do not have any lag, boot, or power drain issues, everything seems to work like it did before install but I dont game and dont run any large software programs. Do run parallels and windows, which is up and running like it was before, but now have much more room for the virtual drive.

Quad Level Cell (QLC) Nand is a co-op of Intel and Micron. These chips do not seem to sacrifice performance to value like other entry level TLC chips may. While this Nvme drive does not perform like an EVO, it does not cost as much as an EVO. Crystal Disk benchmark reflected an as advertised transfer rate with the slowest results as Ive included. This is with 40% of the drive being occupied. Empty and freshly provisioned my highest was over 1900 MB/s read and just over 1800 MB/s write. I suspect that performance may tamper down as the drive space becomes consumed but time will tell. At $8.77 per GB when purchased, this is something Im will to accept. As for the QLC technology and its durability, time will also tell here as well. I do recommend this component to expand or replace current slower storage components like HDD or SSD drives based on the performance to cost ratio.

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.

Very satisfied with this product and the benchmarks one sees on Youtube are spot on. As with any Intel product, compatibility wasnt even a question. Also, the support pages for this on their website is the whole reason to buy this name brand but if that isnt enough the price point was lower than the competition. And personally, I dont even like them as a company because they are too arrogant. LOL But they make a great product and this one shows.

This is the cheapest brand new 2TB NVMe SSD you can buy now. Though the price per GB is really low, the performance penalty of QLC NAND flash really hurts when you run out of the SLC cache. Sometimes it may even dip below 100MB/s. This is a great warehouse for your massive Steam library but I do not recommend using it as your boot drive for Windows. Also the greater the total capacity, the greater amount of SLC cache it have, so I am only comfortable recommending the 2TB version.