Intel ® SSD 660p Series 2.0TB, M.2 80mm PCIe 3.0 x4, 3D2, QLC, NVME $229!!

doug_7506

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Today's "here's what's on sale" email from Newegg has the 2TB 660p for $230 with promo code.

Intel must be really eager to get 660p drives into the wild?
 
Damn, they must be. I checked everywhere last week and couldn't find it under $350+tax.
 
Wow nice! If I didn't pull the trigger on some new drives (1tb WD black & 970 Evo) a few weeks back, I'd totally trade off some speed for double the capacity.

I wonder if this is the beginning of the price drops for 2019 that everyone was talking about last year? Here's hoping!
 
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This seems like the start of excellent pricing. Soon we'll be seeing 2TB sticks for less than $200.
 
Hell of deal is right.


Hopefully a sign of things to come and 2TB SSD’s hit that regular $200 for 2TB price point
 
Very nice deal and a step in the right direction. Soon we can put only 1 big SSD in our computers and don't need an additional HDD anymore. Also important for esports fans because games run faster on SSD.
 
This is great for fans of SFF builds (or laptops).

Whoever gets in on this, drop some feedback on how it runs.
 
I'd say so. Given it's specs say 1800MB/s on both seq read and writes and plenty of people are still using Sata 3 SSDs for their main / boot drive which average 500MB/s - you're still x3+ those drives. No reason it can't be a boot or main drive. It's just a touch slower than the faster / fastest latest gen NVME drives - and that's in benchmarks. I doubt anyone can "seat of their pants" tell the difference.
 
I'd say so. Given it's specs say 1800MB/s on both seq read and writes and plenty of people are still using Sata 3 SSDs for their main / boot drive which average 500MB/s - you're still x3+ those drives. No reason it can't be a boot or main drive. It's just a touch slower than the faster / fastest latest gen NVME drives - and that's in benchmarks. I doubt anyone can "seat of their pants" tell the difference.
As a boot drive, you're probably right. However, as someone that moves many large (~20gb) files, I believe I would notice. Waiting for Samsung prices to drop on similar spec. I am pretty loyal.
 
I'd say so. Given it's specs say 1800MB/s on both seq read and writes and plenty of people are still using Sata 3 SSDs for their main / boot drive which average 500MB/s - you're still x3+ those drives. No reason it can't be a boot or main drive. It's just a touch slower than the faster / fastest latest gen NVME drives - and that's in benchmarks. I doubt anyone can "seat of their pants" tell the difference.
That's peak performance. Reviews show that real world performance is between 500 and 1000 MB/s, so really only up to twice the performance of SATA III. I consistently hit 550 MB/s on my 850 PROs. I mentioned in another thread that I put one in the build I made for my sister and it's super fast on boot. Cold boot into Windows 10 after a full install with all her programs and restoring files only takes about 10-11 seconds from button press to ready while it takes my PC about 20 seconds.
 
While I don't normally refer to his videos, LTT did a really good job breaking down this drive.

The size of the SLC cache scales depending on how much you fill the drive up. In the review, LTT is using only a 512gb 660p. Meaning he only has 75gb of SLC cache.

This deal is for the 2tb version. So even with a 1tb of data or less, you have 152gb of SLC cache. In normal use, you will not notice any drop-off. Meaning you could move a 150gb file without any performance dip. At 500gb or less, you have 280gb of cache. Meaning you could move that 250gb steam folder without any drop in performance because of maxing that cache.

You'll save more than half the price (remember a 970 is currently $500) while never noticing any performance drops in 99% of the task you do.
 

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Yo this thing is a piece of trash. Why the fuck would you buy a 2 tb drive that turns to absolute shit when you use 50% of it when you can buy a similarly priced 1 tb drive that'll always perform well. Garbage.
 
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Yo this thing is a piece of trash. Why the fuck would you buy a 2 tb drive that turns to absolute shit when you use 50% of it when you can buy a similarly priced 1 tb drive that'll always perform well. Garbage.

I think you are missing how the cache works. The cache size decreases as the size of data in the drive increases. Even if you have the drive half full, the drive will still be the same speed as it was when it was empty. The only difference is that the cache will have decreased from 280gb in size to 150gb in size. Meaning you can work with that much data simultaneously without experiencing any performance dips. The controller is moving the data from the SLC cache to the QLC storage to constantly keep performance at optimum levels.
 
I think you are missing how the cache works. The cache size decreases as the size of data in the drive increases. Even if you have the drive half full, the drive will still be the same speed as it was when it was empty. The only difference is that the cache will have decreased from 280gb in size to 150gb in size. Meaning you can work with that much data simultaneously without experiencing any performance dips. The controller is moving the data from the SLC cache to the QLC storage to constantly keep performance at optimum levels.

So, how does it handle being in striped RAID, I wonder?
 
I'd guess that if the stripe exceeds the % used for that one drive in the array, it triggers the same cache reduction / decrease in performance.
 
Whats considered a very large file transfer? 50gb, 100gb?
Snippet from https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-ssd-660p-qlc-nvme,5719.html review (halfway down the page)
The write specification is based on the 660p’s dynamic SLC cache, however, so the drive could slow during extended write workloads when the workload spills over to the native QLC flash. We simulated the condition with a worst-case test, and the 1TB model fell to ~100 MB/s after writing 130GB of data from an empty state. Given the size of the 660p's SLC caches, you will likely never encounter this condition.​

https://www.storagereview.com/intel_ssd_660p_series_review
 
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Very tempting. I'm not one that even has 150gb files on my PC, nor would I really have a need to move them around if I did. Is there any word on QLC endurance compared to TLC?
 
Its not great. But that's still over 100gb a day for 5 years.
 

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Anyone know how to determine what is the minimum size the cache would eventually reduce to as you approach filling the drive to capacity?
 
I own this drive. Picked it up from newegg while it was on sale this thanksgiving. Its my games drive and it may not be the fastest in large file transfers , but while gaming Im always one off the first people in BF V to load a new map.
What good is the Samsung evo or anything that is much faster in large file transfers if im not going to use it. I own a lot of ssd's but they do not really do anything other than are used for 50 - 80 gig swap files and are constantly on.
Best thing about this one was its price and it performs flawlessly. Never had a drive fail on me. Once a month its checked and optimized by intel toolbox. I always try to buy intel ssd's because of longevity , but also have some sandisks that are cheap. and on nonestop for the past two years.
 
What good is the Samsung evo or anything that is much faster in large file transfers if im not going to use it.

This is the reality of SSDs: it's the response times that mattered, as they're an order of magnitude faster than spinners. The spinners are actually fast enough in terms of linear reads and writes, and they're more reliable in terms of writes too.

Only Intel's Optane drives bring an improvement that's beyond measurable to the point that a user might notice, but even then, the delta is pretty small.
 
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