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

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.

There isnt a lot to say about it. It comes as advertised, plugged it in and it worked, simple as could be.

I use this drive for data storage and a Samsung 970 EVO 1TB for my C drive windows 10 and programs. I have hot swapable drive bays I use my old Western Digital mechanical drives in when needed for back up and store old pictures etc. So no drive noises at all during normal use! Less power used, less heat. Current SSD drives temp both at 97 degrees F (no ssd fans); case interior 95 degrees. Computer boot-up time is about 10 - 13 seconds and turns off in 4 seconds. VERY little noise, only the fans which are almost unnoticeable. Motherboard: Gigabyte Z390 AORUS PRO (Intel LGA1151/Z390/ATX/2xM.2)

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.

I got this for some data that has directories with 10s of thousands of files in some of the directories. A standard spinning disk takes minutes to return a search result in the application that manages that data. Years ago I moved to a 500 gig ssd that took search times to just 5 second or so for the same search. Then I moved to a 1 tb ssd running at about 450 and with the increased number of files still maintained the 5 second search time. I was just running out of room on the 1tb drive and wanted to increase performance as well as capacity and I found this on sale for under 200 dollars. Its not as fast as a Samsung NVME but even at about 1/3 the speed its still 2+ times faster than an ssd. I put it in a aftermarket pcie card on my desktop and copied the almost terabyte of data over and though I was going to melt it down. Even with an heat sink it got to hot to touch and data transfer dropped to under 20mbs. It took a long time to copy the data. However once that was done and it cooled down speeds rose back to 1000mbs and my normal data transfers to it of a few mb to maybe a gig at the time run blazingly fast and searches come back in maybe 4 seconds now. It wasnt as big of a jump in performance as I wanted but it was significant and at the price which was less than the standard 2tb samsung ssd I looked at it has done stellar duty.. Its been in daily use for about 6 months now.

I ultimately bought this to be used as an extra drive for storing some applications and other files on. Gets the job done. If you are interested in buying this item, I would highly suggest researching the technology this device uses to see if it would suit your needs, or if you could go for a cheaper alternative that could last longer with more space but longer load times.

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

I wanted to upgrade my Mac Pro 2013 from 256GB SSD to something bigger. 256GB was just too restrictive. I first tried, as many had suggested, the Samsung 970 EVO with the Sintech NGFF M.2 nVME SSD Adapter Card. All went well except after running DriveDX it showed the SSD was about to over-heat! On forums, others suggested a heat sink. I was concerned. Sintech tech recommended the Intel 660p and said they with less power. This SSD was about the same price of the 500GB drive for a 1TB one! I took their advice and ordered this drive. Smart info says its running at 52c which is acceptable. Installed heat sink and temp dropped to 37c. Love it. I got 1TB for the price of 500GB and it works great. Speed is similar to the Samsung. I highly recommend this drive. Awesome!

I bought the 2 TB model and it runs right at advertised reads and writes- I used crystaldiskmark to check. It only took about 5 minutes total to physically install, and maybe another 5 minutes under hardware manager to format. Seems to run fine and it was cheaper than the 512 GB 970 evo I bought last year.... I wonder how cheap NVME SSDs might get here with the glut of flash memory? I would recommend for fast cheap gaming storage.

If youre wondering why this is comparably cheap compared to other M.2 SSDs, there are a couple very good reasons. First is that it uses quad level cell nand, which is the slowest version of MLC memory and has the lowest write endurance limit, meaning its slower when copying very large files and has a much shorter lifespan than SSDs with other memory types. Its not like theyve stated otherwise though, and for anyone not constantly copying large files it shouldnt make a difference and would probably be worth the value. Second and biggest reason is that youre probably buying used through amazon. I can see other reviewers saying the same thing, but when it arrived I noticed that the factory seal had been peeled off and badly pasted back on. The fact that theyre selling used or refurbished SSDs as new probably isnt strictly legal, but I guess Im a pushover for not wanting to go through the return process so long as it works normally and I dont notice that the product itself has been tampered with. I checked with Intel to make sure the 5-year warranty still applies, and it seems like theres no issue there.