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

When you dont know there are two different interfaces, you assume all SSD drives plug in the same way. The PCI drives use a different interface than SATA. Once you know that, they are clearly marked. Before you know that, it is easy to miss. I bought this one based on the reviews, that it was not quite as good as more expensive drives, but well worth the money for what it does. Now I also know I needed a SATA drive, not a PCI drive.

Got this because I didnt have a NVME drive already. My current Samsung 840 EVO (sata) is still great and running just fine, but I wanted something faster and this little drive IS quite a bit faster! Granted there are faster enthusiast NVME drives out there but they also cost enthusiast prices. This should last a while and seems to load my games even faster so yes, it can be used for gaming. The naysayers will point out that once the memory cache fills up you lose performance but all the tests Ive read show this happening on huge file transfers (80GB+), not during gaming. And Ive never run into that before personally so its golden for me and my uses.

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 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.

I wanted a cheap SSD to store my games and stuff on, after having far too many hard drives die. I assumed a cheap 2.5 SATA SSD would be the cheapest, but no, this was. The write endurance isnt fantastic, but its far more than most people will need (If I remember correctly its 200 writes, aka 400TB for the 2TB SSD. Which doesnt sound like a lot, but you could write 100GB a day for 11 years with that, and most people dont even write that much.) Its fast and cheap, but it gets HOT. I would highly recommend buying a heatsink, you can find one for like $6 which will prevent it from slowing down through long writes, and probably make it last longer.

I owned Intel SSDs before, and never had a problem. I trust Intel for it is a good solid company. The Intel site has complete spec, tutorial and all drivers needed, even for old & outdated products. This M.2 SSD came in an Intel box, installed and Intel web site has very good tutorial, how to initialize and format it. My old SSDs after 5 and 7 years still running in my Pentium and i3 PCs.

A 2TB M.2 drive for this price is hard to pass up. The install was easy; Windows 10 detected it. While it runs a little slower than my ADATA 1TB M.2, it is so much faster than my 7200RPM drive that Ill forgive that. Read/Write (ADATA 2850, 1670) (INTEL 1900/1900). For most uses, I think this drive would do just fine and Id buy another (if I had another slot).

Much improved gaming experiences since the M.2 works best with my MSI chipset and 2081Ti video card.

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

This item needed to be enabled in my BIOS before it would be recognized and for it to be a boot device I had to shut off FAST BOOT also in BIOS. Once I did that I am very happy with it. It benchmarks almost twice as fast as other SSDs i have in my system. Knocked off one star for lack of documentation that should have come with it regarding BIOS adjustments. Overall I would recommend it and buy it again.