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

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.

Not only is it fast, but the read/write speed is blistering fast!

I own several of these drives and they all are much faster than my old 2.5 SATA SSDs. These M.2 drives reside directly on the PCIe bus and are 4-5x faster than typical SATA SSDs. The Intel drives are also a good alternative to the much more expensive Samsung M.2 SSDs such as the 970 EVO lineup. The performance, compatibility and reliability are comparable for less money. In fact, Im now considering replacing the 256GB Samsung 970 EVO thats in my HP Pavilion Gaming laptop with an Intel 1TB 660P which would quadruple the storage capacity with basically the same performance.

I bought a MacBook Air (early 2015 model) with just 128gb of memory. I finally to a point where that just wasnt enough. I combined this with Sintech NGFF M.2 nVME SSD Adapter Card (the long one, not the short one), and the combination works great. I had a Time Machine backup, and between it and a flashdrive with an iOS installer I was back up again in an hour or two (it only took about ten minutes to swap out the drive; the rest was all reinstalling the iOS and Time Machine backup). So... for less that $100, my MacBook Air has a new lease on life.

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 The Intel site has complete spec, tutorial and all drivers needed, even for old & outdated products.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.

Quad Level Cell (QLC) Nand is a co-op of Intel and Micron. These chips do not seem to sacrifice performance to value like other entry level TLC chips may. While this Nvme drive does not perform like an EVO, it does not cost as much as an EVO. Crystal Disk benchmark reflected an as advertised transfer rate with the slowest results as Ive included. This is with 40% of the drive being occupied. Empty and freshly provisioned my highest was over 1900 MB/s read and just over 1800 MB/s write. I suspect that performance may tamper down as the drive space becomes consumed but time will tell. At $8.77 per GB when purchased, this is something Im will to accept. As for the QLC technology and its durability, time will also tell here as well. I do recommend this component to expand or replace current slower storage components like HDD or SSD drives based on the performance to cost ratio.

Maybe Im just starting to get old, but 100 bucks for a 1TB NVME SSD is a great deal. Its blazing fast and stays cool under the small heatsink provided with my Gigabyte Aorus B450 board. 1540 read, 1381 write and a sustained write of 1023. Ten times faster than my HDDs and at least twice as fast as my 850 EVO sata SSD.

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.

So Ive had a 5TB mechanical HDD for a couple years and Im sick of it, wanted to cut the extra wires and slower speed, and move the 5TB HDD to a NAS. But I didnt want to lose the space. So when these got down to less than $200 each, I finally decided to buy two of the Intel 660p 2TB m.2s and RAID0 them. I was worried about there being issues doing this on mainstream platforms, due to no PCIe lanes and only the DMI 3.0 on Intel, but theres no issue. Im not worried about the speed from RAID0, just having a 4TB NVMe SSD, and thats what I got. Its great. I also bought two EK M.2 heatsinks to go with them, and they idle at about 32°C, and only get to about 36°C under load. I no longer need any Sata cables for HDDs or anything, just my two m.2s. Im super glad I did this, but now a week later and the drives are $185 instead of $195. But what can ya do. The drives are great! Good bump in speed over my Intel 750 Ive had for 3 years or so. And I couldnt be happier. Great deal.