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

I use this as my OS bot disk, but only part of it. the rest is partitioned to work alongside my other drives as extra space. this this is fast and boot time is awesome. PC boots in 4-5 seconds. for the price per gig, this drive is a good deal, even though it changes from time to time, which pisses me off as at times it will increase out of nowhere, but I digress. since it is intel based, you can use it with the migrating software on the intel website to migrate your data and/or OS over to it. Gaming wise, If you are a modder, this drive is good for loading and deploying mods to games fast. the drive has one large tooth and one small tooth, so itll fit inside the slots with only one groove, NOT 2. make sure you check that out before buying for compatibility reasons.

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.

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.

The price of a 2TB drive was great so I tried it. It is installed in an external case by QNine that works great. I now dont have to carry around the triple sized (which is still small). Long term usage of it in this manner is unknown but so far it works great. I did pair it directly from USB C to USB C but I am not running games from it so I have not even looked at the numbers to see about speeds! Took off ONE star, should have been half a star if it were possible, for a failure of one of two devices but data could be mostly recovered. WARNING: Had one of the two I purchased fail in about a month after the one year point. No problem as there is a 5 year warranty. First thing Intel says is contact the seller; yeah, well Amazons first thing says contact the manufacturer. Thanks, great circular argument. I then spent 2 weeks and many, many hours troubleshooting not only on my own but with the Intel people. Workarounds were required because the information they wanted is impossible to get unless the drive is in the computer - a laptop means you take it apart and put it back together BUT, worse, my laptop only allows ONE of the NVMe PCIe drives to be installed at a time - so once installed it cannot be found as it is the boot drive. No problem - I have an external case but nope - the case doesnt allowed SMART status which is needed. NO PROBLEM - found a great little program which gave me a lot of the SMART data so I could send it to the tech team. Finally, I gave up. The 2 TB of data was backed up so no big deal. Well, kind of no big deal as getting the backup up to date was no easy and yet more time and since it wasnt a real time backup it isnt perfect. None of my time would be a problem except for the last Intel insult - Return of the SSD will be on your dime. WHAT? Oh, yes, they offer to send me the replacement for $25 and the cost of the unit of which the latter will be credited when they get the old drive back. OK, I can see the unit charge until they get it but I have never been charged to send back a FAILED product!!! Most companies feel pretty bad about the failure of their products and want to get a new one out to you fast and get the broken one back! Not Intel, I guess. UPDATE: Intel did replace this drive with a working unit; they were good that when I called no more troubleshooting they were not only QUICK but they overnighted the part to me!!! My ONLY complaint, besides the unit failure - they ding your credit card for over $400 for a part they sell for half of that! IN other words - I think they charge you for BOTH the one sent and the one you are returning for some odd reason as the list price on the Intel website for the part is, like said, half of the price they charge your card for holding purposes.

The GB cost per dollar of this drive is excellent, although the main reason for that is that its QLC technology, which allows for higher capacity on the cheap, but with some drawbacks. Its quite possible this drive will fully wear out before my older MLC and SLC drives, but Intel provides good tools to keep tabs on drive health. All that aside, if this is your first time installing an M.2 drive, youll want to do your homework before you purchase one, as for example, I have an EVGA Z170 motherboard, and in order to activate the M.2 key M socket, it has to be done from BIOS, and doing so will disable SATA ports 4 and 5.

This really increased the speed of my loading times, I am using an older i7 and wanted a slight upgrade for speed and this item was way more speed than expected. It wont make gaming better but as far as load times the difference was phenomenal and very easy to install. I have moderate computer building experience so watch so.e videos to decide if this is something you can handle.

This was my main drive for my computer and it works great. Replaced it with a newer and faster SSD, but this is still in my computer as a second storage SSD. Easy to use and install.

The Intel 660p offers 2 TB at one of the lowest prices for PCIe-based SSDs. Its usually fast, but it can be very slow at times. Thats because its QLC, which is the slowest type of SSD memory. Reads from QLC are fast, but writes are about as slow as an average hard disk. The 660p is usually faster because it has a dynamically sized SLC cache--it treats roughly half of the unused space on the drive as an SLC cache (i.e. disabling the other 3 bits in each cell). Most of the time, its about as fast as a typical SLC or MLC NVMe PCIe drive. If youre writing a large amount of data, or if your 660p is mostly full, it may feel like a hard disk drive.

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.

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.