amazon INTEL 660P reviews
The Series 6 is an M.2 standard SSD and uses Intel’s affordable NVMe interface, and the latest 660P SSD is no exception.
The reason Intel has done this “magic” is because it has succeeded in developing the Flash NAND Quad Level Cell (QLC) memory chip. You can understand a simple way like this: SLC, each cell will contain 1 data bit, MLC each cell has 2 bits, TLC is 3 bits and the latest is QLC with each cell containing up to 4 bits. Each cell contains more data, which means the manufacturer will need fewer memory chips to achieve the same capacity, and the cost will be cheaper. The tragedy is that the more bits a cell contains, the slower the access speed will be, and the life span will decrease.
By reading this, many people will think that Intel SSD 660P using QLC flash memory chip will be nothing but soft price, high capacity, but speed is poor. But the reality is different, the speed of this hard drive must be said to be excellent and guaranteed to meet most of the requirements of common users.
Although not reaching the speed of high-end NVMe SSDs like the 760P or 900P sibling, the Intel SSD 660P generally passes the SSD benchmarks gently with a pretty good score. In fact, booting Windows, loading games / applications and recording most of the data, the Intel SSD 660P is no different from the previous TLC SSDs, affordable price, large capacity.
The M.2 design is also a plus, allowing you to attach to compatible motherboards without taking up a lot of space. SSD 660P is an excellent choice not only for its soft price, high capacity, but also for installation.
Performance details of Intel SSD 660P
Firstly, we go a little deeper into the design of the Intel SSD 660P. This affordable SSD uses the Silicon Motion SM2263 controller in combination with 256 MB DDR3, 512 GB – 2 TB QLC memory chip and an amount of SLC memory cache. In fact, the benchmark results and experience you get when running common tasks are coming from the SLC cache of the hard drive, only when the cache is empty, we can see the real speed of the QLC chip.
To test this, I recorded a 4K HDR Avenger movie file: Infinity War 53 GB capacity from a WD SSD Black 256 GB into Intel SSD 660P 512 GB.
When using SLC cache, the speed of SSD 660P is quite good, stable at above 900 MB / s.
About 77% of the file runs out of cache and now we see the speed drop significantly, somewhere around 56 MB / s until the file copy is complete.
The 512GB version of Intel SSD 660P is equipped with SLC caching of about 30 GB, so basically any task that does not exceed this capacity threshold at a time, you will still get the experience of SLC memory chip. In fact, unless you are a graphic designer or a montage, ordinary users rarely see the real speed of a QLC chip.
In short, the SSD 660P is not merely a development of hardware technology (QLC chip allows high capacity) but also shows the perfection in Intel’s cache algorithm, helping to use SLC cache to Speed up most tasks. And I think this is a reasonable solution at the moment, because ordinary users do not need expensive “perfect” SSDs but instead are affordable but approximate.
where can you get a INTEL 660P online
Intel Solid State Drive (SSD), 660P Series, 1 TB: Buy it now
Intel 660p 512 GB Solid State Drive – PCI Express (PCI Express 3.0 x4) – Internal – M.2 2280-1.76 GB/s Maximum Read Transfer Rate – 1.76 GB/s Maximum Write Transfer Rate – Retail: Buy it now
Intel 660p Series SSDPEKNW512G8X1 512GB M.2 80mm PCI-Express 3.0 x4 Solid State Drive (QLC): Buy it now
Intel SSD 660p Series 1.0TB: Buy it now
Intel SSD 660p Series 2.0TB: Buy it now
