samsung's 970 is only like 30$ more, whats even the point with this 5 layer stuff?

2 TB 660p is cheaper than 1 TB 970 EVO+. 760p was also nearly 1,5 times cheaper just 2 months ago. But recently Intel bumped 760p prices 1.5 times up to 970 EVO+ level.

coth:

2 TB 660p is cheaper than 1 TB 970 EVO+. 760p was also nearly 1,5 times cheaper just 2 months ago. But recently Intel bumped 760p prices 1.5 times up to 970 EVO+ level.

Adata XPG SX8200 pro is the new TLC king.

So it is almost as fast as the old 600p now for a lot less money and almost the same durability. I know some don't like the idea of QLC but this is a nice product for the price. Any time you are getting faster than SATA6 speeds at almost $100/TB that is good.

Loophole35:

Any time you are getting faster than SATA6 speeds at almost $100/TB that is good.

No you don't. You can fill an entire TLC SATA drive at 500+ MB/s with no drops in speed. Crappy QLC goes down to under 100MB/s when the buffer fills up, and that happens quite fast ! These are drives for people that don't do anything useful with their PCs... just watch youtube, spin the mouse-wheel on facebook and talk with their grandma on skype.

wavetrex:

No you don't. You can fill an entire TLC SATA drive at 500+ MB/s with no drops in speed. Crappy QLC goes down to under 100MB/s when the buffer fills up, and that happens quite fast ! These are drives for people that don't do anything useful with their PCs... just watch youtube, spin the mouse-wheel on facebook and talk with their grandma on skype.

You also forgot those of use who need big storage for game installs in our laptops. RDR2 being 150+ GB, for example. And no, I haven't overrun the SLC cache on my 2TB 660p except when I originally copied over the partition.

wavetrex:

No you don't. You can fill an entire TLC SATA drive at 500+ MB/s with no drops in speed. Crappy QLC goes down to under 100MB/s when the buffer fills up, and that happens quite fast ! These are drives for people that don't do anything useful with their PCs... just watch youtube, spin the mouse-wheel on facebook and talk with their grandma on skype.

Linus had to use raw 8k footage to fill the buffer in his tests. The average user and even some light power users will rarely or never fill the TLC cache. And people that are using a computer for that level of power usage are not going to buy this drive to begin with due to the speed is relatively low in the best case scenario. Unless you are trying to write the entire drive in one go this drive is a great budget drive. It's the perfect game drive.

I don't know why the first sentence of this article exists. It is not a contradiction, it is an increase over the previous gen. Not a comparison to TLC as your is your inference. I don't know, maybe slow down a bit and give more thought. Someone has to be the critic/editor. 😛

Loophole35:

Linus had to use raw 8k footage to fill the buffer in his tests. The average user and even some light power users will rarely or never fill the TLC cache. And people that are using a computer for that level of power usage are not going to buy this drive to begin with due to the speed is relatively low in the best case scenario. Unless you are trying to write the entire drive in one go this drive is a great budget drive. It's the perfect game drive.

If the TLC 600p from 2016 is an indication, I'm actually more worried about the endurance. If their TLC drive barely lasted 100TBW or so for a 256GB drive, the QLC might be worse. I mean, I have 2 SSDs in my main PC, and I'm not writing much, yet I still accumulated 20TB on my 850Evo just from some games and browsing the web over 1 year or so. If this was to last for 80TB, I would barely make it to the 5 yrs warranty. The large pseudo-SLC cache is quite good though. You could even install the bigger games without exiting the SLC, that is unless you fill the drive to about 75% from Intel's graphs. I have to say, considering the 600p died at around 75% of its lifetime, I am not putting much trust in the "increase endurance" claims.

toyo:

If the TLC 600p from 2016 is an indication, I'm actually more worried about the endurance. If their TLC drive barely lasted 100TBW or so for a 256GB drive, the QLC might be worse. I mean, I have 2 SSDs in my main PC, and I'm not writing much, yet I still accumulated 20TB on my 850Evo just from some games and browsing the web over 1 year or so. If this was to last for 80TB, I would barely make it to the 5 yrs warranty. The large pseudo-SLC cache is quite good though. You could even install the bigger games without exiting the SLC, that is unless you fill the drive to about 75% from Intel's graphs. I have to say, considering the 600p died at around 75% of its lifetime, I am not putting much trust in the "increase endurance" claims.

Did you read the article? Intel rated the 256GB drive at 72TBW. the drive failed at 144TBW literally twice its life expectancy. The higher the capacity the life span because of more sectors. These are budget NVMe SSD's there is the old saying, "you get what you pay for." I would never recommend any of the 6xxp SSD's as a main OS dive but game drive or a large storage drive yes i would recommend it for that.

Loophole35:

Did you read the article? Intel rated the 256GB drive at 72TBW. the drive failed at 144TBW literally twice its life expectancy. The higher the capacity the life span because of more sectors. These are budget NVMe SSD's there is the old saying, "you get what you pay for." I would never recommend any of the 6xxp SSD's as a main OS dive but game drive or a large storage drive yes i would recommend it for that.

Yes, I did read the article. The way it's written is a bit confusing. They tested the 256GB drive: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/94921/intel-ssd-600p-series-256gb-m-2-80mm-pcie-3-0-x4-3d1-tlc.html Its endurance is 144TBW. The drive failed at 106TBW or so, well below the 144TBW endurance rating, which is quite worrisome to me. Even the article says it clearly at the end, so I have no idea why you ask me if I read it when you seem not to have read it yourself.

When all was said and done, the Intel 600p 256GB wrote nearly 106TB of data. This is less than the revised endurance specification of 144TB TBW that Intel lists in the updated ARK product database.

Being a budget SKU does not excuse dying before the endurance rating, when we have antique SSDs like the 840 series lasting for 900 TBW. I mean, I'm not saying don't buy, but with prices coming down so much, I would really try to score a cheap TLC drive instead on offer. Sure, if you're confident that you don't write much to the SSD, go for these QLC drives. There's a topic on another forum where people have SSDs from 5-6 years ago with just 20-30TBW. By the way, there seems to be HUGE variability within the same SSD series. Might be caused by some sort of silicon lottery for NAND, or by manufacturers that changed the NAND/upgraded controller/firmware etc. without documenting it. A Russian website has a very comprehensive endurance test, and the 600p is there too. This time, the 600p 256GB was able to write no less than 3800TB, which is crazy good, and also raises the question - how can we go from 106TB in one test, to 3800TB in another, for the same drive?

Considering Tom's had a sample size of exactly 1 dive and wrote a conclusion based on that it's in line with their poor journalism they've shown in the past years. They may have had a bad drive, and instead of opening an inquiry into it like the title of the article would suggest they left it at that. If I were running a Tech site like Tom's Hardware and had a drive fail that early I would see if I could work with a vendor or even the manufacture to get a larger sample size and test further. Tom's is more about sensationalism these days than actual tech journalism.

For those looking for faster budget NVMe drives from Intel.... You're welcome.... I just got my 660P a few weeks ago so this 665P had to be released....

wavetrex:

These are drives for people that don't do anything useful with their PCs... just watch youtube, spin the mouse-wheel on facebook and talk with their grandma on skype.

What exactly is wrong with doing those things? Playing games isn't exactly "useless" either....