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

So I had this SSD for about 2 months now, and I can tell you this... Once you switch from an HDD to an SSD, theres no turning back. This SSD isnt the fastest or most reliable, but if youre looking for something to replace a laptop HDD or just want fast cheap storage, this is the best bang for the buck (unless you wait for the 2TB one to drop in price). This suited my needs of just replacing the HDD in my laptop and making it feel tons faster. The difference is insane, as I just wait 5-10 seconds for my PC to boot, rather than the 5-10 minutes it used to take to have Steam, Discord and the other applications ready to be used. For gaming, its great. Games are notably faster in load times, such as Final Fantasy taking less time to load worlds and such. I use to have issues where my HDD would be capped out in how fast it can work, now the SSD barely gets to 30% usage when installing games. However, I do have to say to not install this on any PC, because it depends on your CPU to make the most of it. Since I have a laptop i5, its not the smartest choice as my CPU at times cant keep up with the speeds. Other than that, its a solid SSD.

So Ive had a 5TB mechanical HDD for a couple years and Im sick of it, wanted to cut the extra wires and slower speed, and move the 5TB HDD to a NAS. But I didnt want to lose the space. So when these got down to less than $200 each, I finally decided to buy two of the Intel 660p 2TB m.2s and RAID0 them. I was worried about there being issues doing this on mainstream platforms, due to no PCIe lanes and only the DMI 3.0 on Intel, but theres no issue. Im not worried about the speed from RAID0, just having a 4TB NVMe SSD, and thats what I got. Its great. I also bought two EK M.2 heatsinks to go with them, and they idle at about 32°C, and only get to about 36°C under load. I no longer need any Sata cables for HDDs or anything, just my two m.2s. Im super glad I did this, but now a week later and the drives are $185 instead of $195. But what can ya do. The drives are great! Good bump in speed over my Intel 750 Ive had for 3 years or so. And I couldnt be happier. Great deal.

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.

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’ve abused the heck out of this thing. Nvidia ShadowPlay has basically constantly been recording to this for 3ish years now. Drive health is at 95%. Literally no issues. Plenty fast for daily use. If you don’t need bleeding edge stuff, you won’t notice a difference between this and a Samsung 970 Evo or whatever. I’d know, I have one of those as well lol. If all you do is game, this is still a great SSD. I’d assume the newer versions of this are probably worth having a look at.

Item was for my son

This drive is good however it may not work with some systems like HP all in ones with an AMD processor. It did not work, so I had to use a different brand that did work. But not a total loss because I purchased a NVME enclosure so I can still use it as an external drive and it does work quite well. If you have an Intel system I would recommend this drive and you cant beat the price. AMD systems are quite picky on certain hardware, that is one thing Carey Holzman stated and he is correct. If you plan to use this as an external drive I would still recommend.

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.

Bottom line: Its a nice NVMe at an awesome price from a highly reputable manufacturer. I just wish they had not dropped the ball on implementing Opal and Full-Drive-Encryption. :( What a great price for Intels 660p 2TB NVme! The unit also has a 5 year warranty to support Intels confidence in the QLC. I have had not issues during testing and the unit is getting solid reviews. The only issue I have found, which may not be easily noticed because in Intels specs it says Supports AES-256, is that does NOT mean it supports the ATA Password found in many laptops like the Thinkpads. I found this afer having tested the unit for a few hours. When I booted to BIOS to set the NVMes ATA password, no password could be set. Hmm, thats odd so after some digging I found that while Intel publishes the drive supports AES-256, they do not clearly specify that they support something something called Pyrite which a less secure subset of the more secure Opal Full-Drive-Encryption (FDE) standard. Why oh why did Intel omit Opal FDE when it has been available on so many of their units in the past? I mean come on guys? So for me, on a portable Thinkpad laptop, any SSD or NVMe unit which does not support an ATA drive password and FDE is a show-stopper. What that means is that the Intel 660p does NOT support full HARDWARE encryption in machines that use/support the ATA password to do so. For instance, Lenovo Thinkpads have had ATA HDD passwords for a very, very long time but when this unit is installed, the familiar ATA HDD password in the BIOS is not available. So if the NVMe is removed from the machine and you do not have bitlocker fully enabled, then the drive can be compromised. Im not a happy camper because I specifically checked for the AES-256. What I assumed is that meant it also supported the ATA password used for encryption and it does not. I just didnt read the fine print. IDK if Intel will eventually enable this via the firmware - that seems doubtful as are running custom firmware on these devices. The reason I derated the 2nd star is the software application Intel has released to support the 660p (and other models) seems quite lacking when compared to things like Samsung Magician which Ive also used. Peace.

I have been using the Intel 660p M.2, as a storage medium for editing videos (4k), meaning I dump the raw footage onto the 660P using either or even both Resolve and PrPro/AE to edit, without any lag or having to wait hours for footage to load. I will admit some of the more intense graphics may take a tad longer but I suspect that is more due to limitations of the CPU/GPU.