Best secondary 2TB M.2 SSD?

Is Intel 660p the best value secondary/storage 2TB SSD on the market now? Cheaper than WD Blue SATA! Yes, 970 EVO PLUS is faster and 3x as reliable, but over 2.25x more expensive. 400 TBW is not massive but should be more than enough to cover a few years of dropbox storage and steam/oculus store dump.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/u...eries-2-0tb-m-2-80mm-pcie-3-0-x4-3d2-qlc.html
https://www.tomshardware.co.uk/intel-ssd-660p-qlc-nvme,review-34464-3.html

Thoughts?

 

Never use a QLC SSD as your boot drive, BUT if its gonna be holding games and one drive and other bulk storage like that, its perfect. The write caching system on QLC drives makes it suck for write heavy work loads, but if its all read? Hell yes its perfect.

 

Thanks, Anandtech review looks good too:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13078/the-intel-ssd-660p-ssd-review-qlc-nand-arrives/6


Sabre Rocket 2TB might be a contender, however, there is basically no support material on their website (no drivers, firmware etc):

https://www.sabrent.com/product/2tb...gh-performance-solid-state-drive/#description

They don't even quote TBW reliability. Couldn't find a single "pro" review either. Amazon reviews are mixed. That said, it's just 25% more expensive than the 660p and quite a bit faster if it actually works.

 

Is it for write intensive work? There's Micron 1100 which sells rather quickly and its an OEM drive.
If its just for storage and nothing very critical grab it.

 

Looks interesting but TBW is very low at 400 and M.2 2TB doesn't seem to be available in the UK.

Getting the Corsair MP510. It's rates at 3700 TBW... SATA M.2 is dead.

 

My condolences on your dead M.2 port.

 

I hope the port is fine. I am just saying there is hardly any point getting a new SATA M.2 drive if NVME is also supported. Still, I guess it's nice the m15 still supports SATA on the second port in case someone has an old SSD they want to use.

 

SATA SSD are still relevant because NVMe drives throttle very quickly under 30 sec of heavy write IO while SATA maintain the same speeds for longer just because SATA3 restricts to 6Gb/s.

 

High end NVMe drives like 970 EVO don't throttle at all, and this budget Corsair throttles to "just" twice the max speed of SATA and is cheaper than 860 EVO.

 

Most M.2 throttle point is set to 70C including Samsung SSDs.

 

Possibly, but
a) it's not too difficult to keep SSD temps under 70C, at least in air conditioned rooms / temperate climate
b) throttling at 70C doesn't result in performance collapse to SATA levels

 

Depends on SSD and IO workload/size.
My Avg or usual temps is around 30-35C so whichever drive you buy they can boil eggs.

 

The Corsair runs at 38-39C so won't be boiling any eggs on it fortunately.

 

I mean full IO load when ambients are >35C.
Your ambients are too low.

 

LOL, my ambients are too high - 22C would have been more comfortable. Yes, I was referring to temps during benchmarking. Even if I was testing on a beach in Egypt, temps would still be under 70C.

 

Maybe the memory but not the controller.

 

I only see one temperature number for the Force MP510, and it's good 7C cooler than the lower of two temp numbers for 970 EVO Plus.

 

I have 1 number for my ex950 also. Thats means we have no idea what our controller temp is. It will be hotter then the memory temp it gives you for sure! @c69k Knows this first hand. His oem ssd is down to 88% health!

 

SMART reading description is Composite Temperature, so not clear it's memory specifically. Anyway, will keep an eye. Isn't SSD health just a function of TBW?

 

Pretty positive the temp is for memory like every other ssd out there. No one has controller temp except samsung (could be wrong, only seen on samsung). Function of TBW? I don't think so because temp can have a huge effect on health.

 

Well, intuition aside, the question is: how exactly is the health percentage calculated? Fair enough with the concern of temps on SSD health, but then surely the memory temp would be a primary consideration and at 37-40C I'm not worried at all.

 

I just look at SMART status esp. Pre-Fail type of flags. In SSD, Spare cells, TBW,Temps(Worst), amount of SLC cache determine the lifetime of SSD but they are not precise and just approximations.
CDI shows 100% disk health while HWINFO reports 96% health on an SSD based on Spare cells availability.

 

Memory actually runs better when it's warmer (obviously not hot). Not sure how much of a difference it makes.

 

Drive life remaining is based on TBW for most drives, yes temps can have an effect but its not as simple to factor that in. So to keep it simple its based on TBW for most drives assuming they operate within rated temp limits. I'm sure maybe some manufacturers use complicated algorithms, but according to some places (including HWI Info's creator on their forums, when someone asked a similar question) I scoured regarding this long back this was generally the explanation.

As for the sensor, on a few of them that I did see location labels of it, the sensor was actually on the controller itself, ie Oracles 1.6 TB drives (though SATA), so it could vary by manufacturer.

Interestingly high temperatures are good for write endurance and cooler temperatures are good for data retention (In a 0-70C range), Slide 50 . A song of Ice and Fire lol.
https://people.inf.ethz.ch/omutlu/pub/heatwatch-3D-nand-errors-and-self-recovery_hpca18_talk.pdf

 

Do you have any reading material as to why it would be bad as a boot drive? Is it just for lack of speed or is it because it is more prone to failure? I ask because I was considering this in an ultrabook that only has 1 spot for an SSD.

 

Based on the reviews, the speed is pretty good as long as it works off the TLC caches, then it collapses to 100MB/s (after tens of gigabytes have been transferred). I'd think the only 2 reasons to get this instead of the Corsair MP510 are 1) probably slightly cooler and more power efficient on paper (that said the MP510 is quite cool, certainly much cooler than Samsungs) 2) it's slightly cheaper.

 

It just won't be as reliable and breaks down quicker. Read an article about slc, mlc, tlc, qlc. They have more. QLC stores more bits per cell.

 

Read my post in the Link about NAND types, QLC isn’t mentioned but SLC/MLC/TLC are and you will understand what the other posters are speaking about, QLC means 4 bits per cell FYI. That post also speaks about endurance vs bits per cell.

Look half way into post.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...ews-and-advice.429972/page-1129#post-10735535

 

I was looking at my 850 evo and 850 pro and they both are rated for the same TBW (150). My 850 pro has 10TB of writes and 850 evo has 1.5TB of writes. Both 99% health according to hwinfo64 and 100% health for crystaldisk (For both ssds).

 

Check Spare cell aka Percentage Used. 850 Evo will report more spares used eventhough TBW <1. I tried secure erasing several times but %age used is steadily increasing.

 

Depends on size, comparing same size drives the PRO will always have double the TBW (the conservative warrantied writes not the actual write endurance) and overall warranty is also different for both PRO (10 Yrs) compared to EVO ( 5 Yrs) assuming you didn’t hit TBW.

I’m assuming you are comparing a 256 GB PRO (150 TBW) with a 500/1000 GB EVO (150 TBW)? Not a lot of writes yet on either in your case.

Thanks for the CD Info data. I miss spoke looking back at my sources again and the Tech Report endurance test data. The SMART endurance is based on “estimated” real endurance of the NAND not the warrantied TBW.

Basically it also takes into account real writes as in it includes (WA) write amplification as well (ie 1 host write equaling 2 or more real writes, greater the amplification the less empty space on drive).

 

Thanks everyone for the replies. Great knowledge base!

 

Both drives are the same size (512GB vs 500GB). According to Samsung's specs, both are 150 TBW. Yeah the 10 year warranty was a major selling point. Thanks for letting me know about how many writes I have. I really have no idea how many writes people usually have or get to before dies. I know the Samsung 850 pro lasted 9100 TBW before it died. Minimum of 2200 TBW. According to guru.

 

I've been using a 2TB 660p for about a week, got it for $190 shipped to UAE and have been very very impressed with it so far. It's just a secondary storage for games and movies and it does the job quite well. For price to performance ratio, it beats everything out in the market today.

My primary OS drive is also a QLC based 1TB Crucial P1 and I don't needed anything faster than this quite frankly. I don't get the fuss about this QLC based drives anyway, if it lasts me for 5 years, I'm more than happy with my investemnt. I don't do anything professional on my laptop anyway.
I use it to game, surf, watch movies and occasional video and photo rendering of family holidays.
Work-wise, I use it for Office spreadsheets and Google sheets and it works just fine on a QLC drive imo. It serves my needs with minimal costs.

Sent from a Galaxy S9+

 

I actually quoted Samsung the 850 PRO 512GB is warrantied till 300 TBW, it’s the 256 GB version that’s warrantied till 150 TBW. So yeah you also get double the TBW which is nice.
https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/support/warranty/
https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/product/consumer/850pro/

Tech Report’s endurance test showed the older 840 Pro (256 GB) started using reserve blocks near 600 TB and lasted till 2,400 TB before dying. The life indicator in SMART hit 0% at like 450 TB, warrantied host writes is 73 TBW. The 840 EVO (250 GB) started using replacement blocks by 90-100 TB and died at like 900 TB after exhausting the last reserv blocks. Shows quite a delta between MLC and TLC. Modern V-NAND drives should put up pretty good numbers.

The biggest caveat is that they didn’t turn off the test computers intermittently for long periods to test for data retention, which I admit would be time consuming.

 

Does anyone know how self-encryption works in the likes of Corsair MP510 and Samsung 970 EVO? If I'm understanding correctly these drives are already self-encrypting and if connected to another computer the data will be unreadable (even without enabling any Class 0 encryption). Don't have the means to verify this at the moment.

EVO 970 supports TCG Opal but the only advantage is additional password protection at the expense of complication:

https://vxlabs.com/2015/02/11/use-t...-disk-encryption-your-tcg-opal-ssd-with-msed/

 

I’m using a 2tb m.2 660p right now as my boot drive and it gets slow after sometime I don’t understand it’s an ssd wtf is going on temps are fine, is cache the issue because it has some horrendous write speeds compared to my 970 evo or 960 pro they never had this issue, everything was lightning quick with those Samsung nvme drives and the temps went up lightning quick too

 

Source (2nd post): https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/intel-660p-worth-the-upgrade.2564180/

 

I fell into the trap of the cheap price, now I have to live with this! Thanks for the info btw.

 

Yeah unfortunately the first rule of QLC is don't use it as boot drive. It's great as a storage drive for games and bulk data, but its a horrible boot drive.

Sell it, you'll probably get at least half your money back lol

 

Have you tried Intel NVMe drivers? https://downloadcenter.intel.com/do...-Windows-Drivers-for-Intel-SSDs?product=35125