Intel SSD 660P Series 512GB PCIe Gen3 x4 M.2-2280 Internal Solid State Drive

I bought the 2TB model. The installation was simple; just make sure your board has the right M-Key M2 slot. I just turned off the computer, put this drive in, booted up, and went to the computer management portion in Windows to partition and format it. It was a very easy and fast process.It should be noted this drive uses QLC memory, which is the worst and cheapest. If you are doing a database workload or will utilize heavy writes, like writing 200GB+ files regularly, you won't be happy. If you plan to use this as a drive to store applications such as games, you'll be quite happy.This drive has a decently sized SLC cache, so as long as the file writes don't get large and frequent, it'll make the drive overall fast enough; by that I mean 2GB/s or very close to it. If the writes are large and frequent, this drive will be slow. If that is your workload...pay for it with an appropriate drive.My use case is a drive to store all of my games. With many being over 50GB now, you need a big drive if you have lots of games like I do. For this purpose, the drive is outstanding in terms of value. It delivers great performance in the use case of reading all those textures and feeding the RAM and CPU.If you want to use this as a boot drive, you can. It will work well in this case, but there are better options if you want outstanding performance. Still, this is a big upgrade if you're using a magnetic disk or old SSD.As to the durability of QLC, if your use case is application storage, this really shouldn't be anything to worry about. Unless you're doing very high write workloads, the SSD will last a long time. I have a 10 year old Intel SSD, and the Intel tool says it is only 10% through it's life, and I used that as an OS drive for many many years.

This drive is outstanding for general everyday use. I use it to store my Steam library, movie collection, photos, and a lot of archival backups and that sort of thing so it has worked great for me for the past 3 months. I bought this drive because my new laptop doesn't have slot for big 2.5" mechanical drives and instead only has 2 NVMe slots. I chose a fast SLC NVMe SSD (Samsung 970 Evo) as my primary boot drive to get stupid-fast speeds for my operating system + apps and then chose this Intel 660p SSD as my storage drive where I keep the rest of my bigger files that don't necessarily need to be accessed ludicrously-fast.Don't get me wrong, this is still a very speedy drive and it's served me very well and I have no complaints, but remember that you're buying this to get a huge amount of storage at a really good price (for NVMe SSDs anyways). Other 2TB NVMe SSDs can be twice as expensive. The value is the amount of storage, not the performance or longevity. That's the benefit of this drive. You will get pretty good read and write speeds, especially with relatively smaller files (a couple GB) but once the SLC cache fills up performance will dip substantially (see screenshots). Writing files that are several hundred MB or a couple GB usually goes very fast, but bigger files will slow down after the initial burst. This drive can be great, but just consider how you'll be using this. You can probably use it as your boot drive and install Windows just fine, but that's not the ideal use case of this drive in my opinion.

NVMe SSD drives are finally coming down near SATA SSD prices and this unit is a beast for the cost and performance. While not as fast as offerings from Samsung, the 660p drive's QLC NAND flash makes up much of the difference by having an additional 240GB SLC cache in front. This cache is a revolving buffer that writes in background to the QLC. Once filled however, you may find files in the 10s or 100s of GBs may slow down at some point but, that's a lot of fast NAND to fill up for the average user. Power users pushing very large video or audio files for editing however may not be as satisfied as they can conceivably run past that cache size and begin writing directly to the QLC NAND. At that point, writes become slower than even the worst SATA SSD's on the market due to QLC's very poor write performance.Drive lifetime is another consideration. From longest to shortest TBW: SLC > MLC > TLC > QLC. QLC's total TBW (Terabytes Written) is about a quarter of MLC I believe, meaning you are sacrificing longevity for cost however even at 400TBW, this will last an average user 3-5 years and those who don't game much or edit media will see longer times. This number however is for the QLC memory only while the SLC will have a longer lifespan. Some percentage of users don't even fill up the 240GB of SLC giving them exceptional value with a drive of this design.In summary, for most users who want fast load times for video games or even just getting into Windows or Linux in seconds, this drive is fast enough that you won't notice the difference between this and a higher performance NVMe SSD. Power users needing the higher initial and sustained throughput of something like Samsung's EVO PRO line may not be as happy with the performance of these QLC drives and should probably stick with TLC/SLC drives.EDIT:Update 1 year later -With the drive a little over half full, I've used only 13.7 TBW out of 400. I do a ton of gaming on this machine and expected a much higher number.Also, I did finally fun into an issue with the front side SLC cache filling up during a large copy from my RAID but using Intel's SSD Toolbox I was able to clear the cache with a single click and bring performance right back up to full speed maxing out my RAID's read speed at about 420 MB/s.Pros: Price/MB Front-end SLC cache makes it a good performerCons: Shorter lifespan than other NAND technologies (low TBW) Once exceeding SLC cache, drive can be VERY slow - NOTE: use the Intel SSD Toolbox to clear this periodically and you'll be fine.