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

Not very fast, but compatible with almost every motherboard and can be had a good price.

This is the cheapest brand new 2TB NVMe SSD you can buy now. Though the price per GB is really low, the performance penalty of QLC NAND flash really hurts when you run out of the SLC cache. Sometimes it may even dip below 100MB/s. This is a great warehouse for your massive Steam library but I do not recommend using it as your boot drive for Windows. Also the greater the total capacity, the greater amount of SLC cache it have, so I am only comfortable recommending the 2TB version.

It is great for its price and ability to perform with stability, overall the speeds are normal for an nvme SSD, nvme uses the pcie interface so it is faster than a sata, if you want a reliable and budget gaming/editing ssd look no further.

Prior to this SSD drive, I had a SanDisk 960 GB SATA SSD M.2 drive. I am transferring files at ~200-400 MB/s with that drive, but this Intel M.2 NVMe SSD blows it out of the water. I would personally say this is in between the speeds of SATA SSDs and high-end NVMe SSDs since I was getting benchmark speeds of ~ 1.4 GB/s. It was super easy to install on Windows 10 Pro 64 bit OS on an Alienware 17 R3 laptop, and I plan on transferring this drive to a new laptop in the future once the 9th gen Intel processors release to retain data. Keep in mind that this isnt a glorified Samsung Pro series NVMe SSD, but it definitely raises brows amongst the tech community in terms of value and performance. At a rated 200 TB TBW, this NVMe drive will go a long way. Lets say I transferred 10GB of data daily... That means I would be writing 3.65 TB of files a year making this theoretically capable of lasting about 55 years. Realistically, I plan to replace this drive after 5 years of use due to the exponential advancement in tech... In the meantime, this is the best deal you can get from a reliable company in regards to speed, reliability, endurance, and value. Overall, this makes a perfect storage drive for content creators, gamers, or tech enthusiasts looking for value and performance.

The capacity is very good and the speed good too. My only complaint is the mounting it requires a very small special screw. It should be included with the board. I had to order the screw after realizing I did not have the appropriate screw. Now I have 15 of the special screws and will lose them before I find a need for them.

Its pretty easy to install but it comes with no screws, it uses the same screws as a hard drive caddy (at least for my laptop). It definitely makes games load faster but one drawback (and the main reason for cheap price) is that when dealing with files over 50GB this slows down drastically (110-130MB/s). However this wont affect you during gaming. You see, manufacturers put the fastest speed with best case scenario on their descriptions. So this can be just as fast as advertised but under specific conditions. Imagine like a car manufacturer saying “up to 40 miles per gallon” it doesnt mean that you will get 40 mpg every single time, it just means that it can happen with the right conditions. I used it on my MSI Raider laptop as well as my Asus GU502. Both use PCIE NVME 3x2 and 3x4.

Updeat - 2 yeas of use and not one problem. Moved to external device and then to a new computer and it still works perfectly. Works well so far. Write and read speeds are good for such an inexpensive NVME. Speed drops after the first few GBs to a steady 600 MBS. Tested on old 990FX with FX8370 cpu in a Pcie 2.0x4 slot. If I remember to update this rating and it is still working in six months it will get all five stars. Compared to regular SSDs this is a great bargain.

I’ve abused the heck out of this thing. Nvidia ShadowPlay has basically constantly been recording to this for 3ish years now. Drive health is at 95%. Literally no issues. Plenty fast for daily use. If you don’t need bleeding edge stuff, you won’t notice a difference between this and a Samsung 970 Evo or whatever. I’d know, I have one of those as well lol. If all you do is game, this is still a great SSD. I’d assume the newer versions of this are probably worth having a look at.

Intel solid state drive comes without OEM box and mounting screw. This is no big deal. Works and performs as advertised.

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.