Intel 660p NVMe M.2 SSD Review

Introduction

For as long as solid state drives have been a thing, Intel has been known for making some of the highest quality SSDs on the market. However, this usually came with a pretty hefty premium, like the 750 series when they first launched. Then, in August of 2016, they introduced their first budget friendly NVME M.2 SSD with the 600p. It was a great value, if you were willing to give up a little speed when compared to other NVME SSDs. The Intel 600p advertised sequential read and write speeds of around 1800 and 560 MB/s. Although this is much higher than the saturation point of a SATA 6 SSD (550 read and 520 write), it was still much slower that the average NVME SSD. However, it was also much cheaper than your average NVME M.2. At launch, I paid only $69.99 at launch for a 250 gb 600p.

Now, about two years later, Intel has done it again with the launch of their all new 660p NVME M.2. This is Intels latest offering of PCIE gen 3 X4 NVMe SSDs and the first consumer QLC, or Quad Level Cell drive to hit the market. They come in 512 GB, 1024 GB and 2048 GB variants and advertise speeds of up to 1800 on the read and 1800 on the write. The read speeds may be the same as the 660p, but the write speeds are estimated at over 1200 MB/s faster than the 600p. They have also priced the 660p below the launch price of the 600p. So, we have a faster, cheaper drive that its predecessor, potentially. We recently picked up a 660p to run it through our suite of benchmarks. Now let’s see how it did.

Specifications