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Another awesome storage deal from MicroCenter. While I would never use a QLC NAND drive in a mission-critical application, for most users, this is a fantastic amount of storage that's reasonably fast for a bargain price.
There's a reason that the 660p is just about the cheapest SSD -- SATA or NVMe -- out there. After the SLC cache is full, performance starts to look like a hard drive (
http://www.thessdreview.com/featured/intel-ssd-660p-m-2-nvme-ssd-review-1tb/6/). Intel doesn't position it as anything but an entry-level solution, and many workloads will be fine with it, but just be aware that if you have large data needs, it's probably not the best choice.
The SLC cache on the 1 TB model is 12 GB, which will be more than enough for the overwhelming majority of home PC users. Anyone with a heavy workload will want to go with a Samsung 970 Pro or straight to an enterprise-class drive.
The cache isn't quite that bad...it's 130 GB, not 12 or 13 GB. But it's not only throughput,
but also latency, that goes through the floor on the 660p when the cache is blown through.
Again, if that's what your needs are, OK -- just be aware that it has limitations that are much more severe than other NVMe (or even SATA) SSDs don't.
MLC = King of sustained performance and endurance
TLC = Good cheap option with average sustained performance, lower endurance, not recommended unless you're on a really tight budget!
QLC = Pure garbage to trick people into thinking oh wow! I got a good deal on this shiny 1TB SSD!
A lot of enterprise drives these days (I suspect mostly read-optimized ones) are TLC (or, as Samsung calls it, 3-bit MLC). QLC is another matter. But the 660p performs particularly poorly even by QLC standards when one gets into fairly large amounts of data. Granted, not everyone is going to write 150TB onto it right away, but at that point, it's down to HDD performance, and
under suffiient load, even the latency gets into HDD territory.
The big thing about NVMe drives in general in typical single user applications is just how much benefit is to be gained with throughput above 500 MB/sec. The latency of NVMe drives is also better, but even SATA SSDs have pretty good latency, so either you need something that has really extreme random access needs or can source/sink data at faster than SATA throughput. Raw speeds & feeds are the kinds of things we high end types like to talk about, but unless you're serving a lot of data over a lot of very fast channels, you're probably going to have trouble doing that. For even hard core g4m3rz like you,
there's likely precious little difference between any SSD.
That 660p looks better than the 1tb 600p (32Gb SLC cache) I have, which craters to an average of 90Mb/sec after about 38Gb continuous writes.
No complaints as I bought it as a secondary drive knowing that
If the 660p gets 130Gb out of a 12Gb SLC buffer they've done something impressive with the buffer management. If you don't see yourself writing 130gb to the drive and waiting there twiddling your thumbs waiting for it to finish, it's not going to be an issue.
Every time the industry has upped another bit performance, and especially durability, has taken a big hit. Then after a while development returns most of both. Better to let somebody else be an early adopter. Bought two 2tb SSD's lately for much the same price (£160 delivered). An unused Crucial Mx500 and a well used Samsung 850 Evo. Ether, by rights should cost a little more but little for the extra peace of mind.
I would rather buy 128GB SSD and 7200RPM 1TB HDD for less money, than this Intel 660 1TB SSD. At least I would have say what to keep on fast SSD and what should be on much slower HDD, with Intel SSD you probably have no control what stays in a fast cache and what's dumped into much slower section of the drive, so it would be a gamble. And for those who think 130GB fast cache is enough, probably don't need 1TB drive to begin with. There are less expensive "normal" SSD (fast speed across whole drive) so I'm not sure what's the benefit of this crippled SSD is, because it's not the speed and it's not the price, at least not yet. Is it Intel logo?
*Warning* I'm not absolutely positive about what's below, but this is my understanding from what I've read.
The SLC cache is really a buffer not so much as a cache. It's actually the same silicon as the QLC, but I believe the controller treats it as SLC rather than QLC, and it can shift real estate back and forth between the two. When data is written to the device, it first goes to the SLC region, and when the device is idle it's then written to QLC. If the device is close to full, the SLC region is smaller, since there's less space available for it.
The bottleneck is writing from the SLC buffer to QLC. That's normally done during idle time, but if too much data is being written very quickly, the SLC buffer has to be written out while data is also being written from the host to the SLC, and that's badly bottlenecked.
Reading from QLC is slower than reading from SLC, but it's not too bad; the big problem is if there's still data in the SLC that needs to be flushed to the QLC while the QLC is also being read. So the big problem is when there's a lot of data being written to the 660p.
Again, that's my understanding -- someone who knows this in more detail can amend that.
That sounds about right. It's also the Samsung 970 Pro's hallmark benefit over the 970 EVO - the Pro uses MLC (2bit) all the way, without any SLC cache to exhaust. The 970EVO uses TLC (3bit) with SLC caching area, which means it will have better burst performance than the 970 Pro (until the SLC allocation runs out). I use a 970 Pro as a video scratchpad, one of a few instances where the Pro has any advantage over the EVO whatsoever (the other is theoretical longevity, though it's almost a nonissue given my upgrade cycle).
That is correct you got it, the drive can use anywhere from the minimum 12GB of SLC cache (1TB version) all the way to 140GB depending on available free space. The controller is just treating that portion of the NAND as SLC by pretty much only writing 1 bit of data when asked rather than up to 4. Some people mistakenly think however that this minimum of 12GB SLC (48 GB of actual QLC NAND) cache is in addition to the 1TB of NAND, infact its actually deducted from the total space. The controller frees up the SLC cache to the QLC portion (and TLC portion in case of TLC drives) as you write to it, so unless you are doing a lot of large transfers constantly, for most users and gamers it will be just fine. Id still suggest TLC over QLC though.
2 Bit MLC drives are fast enough to sustain full speed transfer rates however that they don't come with any SLC cache.(ie Samsung PRO drives)
For most people the 2tb version is pretty good or good enough. I once had 2 in my older laptop but I had to change them when I started doing editing work for a friend.
Yeah when you have Phison E12 based TLC drives like the Inland at lower prices ($99.99 for 1 TB when it was on sale), no reason to get the 660p with it’s relatively terrible Silicon Motion controller and QLC NAND.
Cheapest 2TB Phison E12 drive I think is the MyDigitalSSD BPX at $225-$230. Inland only goes up to 1TB.
The 660p if priced more aggressively vs TLC products would be pretty decent but I personally don’t think it’s all that competitive at the moment as it’s overpriced.
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