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

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.

I’m giving this 5 stars because of the price. The performance is definitely admirable! However, it’s not as fast as other NVMe drives. Amazing bang for your buck drive, more than double the speeds of 2.5 sata drives, well worth the money! Ugly green! Definitely get a heat spreader. Also, not that any M.2 drives really do, but the cooling on this thing sucks. Under heavy loads you will get throttling. I put a cheap $20 spreader on it and have 0 issues with heat/now this ugly green thing isn’t messing up my black/red board

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.

Its pretty easy to install but it comes with no screws, it uses the same screws as a hard drive caddy (at least for my laptop). It definitely makes games load faster but one drawback (and the main reason for cheap price) is that when dealing with files over 50GB this slows down drastically (110-130MB/s). However this wont affect you during gaming. You see, manufacturers put the fastest speed with best case scenario on their descriptions. So this can be just as fast as advertised but under specific conditions. Imagine like a car manufacturer saying “up to 40 miles per gallon” it doesnt mean that you will get 40 mpg every single time, it just means that it can happen with the right conditions. I used it on my MSI Raider laptop as well as my Asus GU502. Both use PCIE NVME 3x2 and 3x4.

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.

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!

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.

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.

I bought this and have it in a Sabrent external USB enclosure I put it in. The only issue Ive been having (besides USB c not working) is that data transfers burst at great speeds but after like 10 seconds they drop to only 100MB/sec. Probably has something to do with the USB enclosure but could also be because this nvme doesnt use a dram cache I doubt think not sure. Otherwise this is by far the best deal for a 2tb nvme ssd.

I’m running 2 of these in a storage pool for a total of 2 Tbs. Are they the fastest drive on the market? No but they work well enough for the average person. Sustained writes tend to bog the controller down but if you’re coming from a normal sata ssd, you’ll be very pleased. My first solid state drive was an intel 160gb sata II back in 2008 and it’s still running. I have no reason to believe that these drives will outlive the system they are installed in.