Intel is selling cheap?

[AndreiArgeanu]

Just seen this in my Google News page, what are your opinions on it? 

[TheKDub]

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

It looks interesting, although it's QLC, and only has a 200TB write endurance.

 

For comparison, the 1TB Samsung 970 Evo ($250 USD) has a 600TB write endurance, and the 1TB Samsung 970 Pro ($350 USD) has a 1200TB write endurance. The 1TB Samsung 860 Evo ($150-170) also has a 600TB write endurance.

 

Despite the tempting price tag, its performance isn't much to write home about, especially when the drive starts to fill up.

[AndreiArgeanu]

1 minute ago, TheKDub said:

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

It looks interesting, although it's QLC, and only has a 200TB write endurance.

 

For comparison, the 1TB Samsung 970 Evo ($250 USD) has a 600TB write endurance, and the 1TB Samsung 970 Pro ($350 USD) has a 1200TB write endurance.

That is true, but I suppose for an average user this write endurance is OK I suppose for 1-2 years maybe, but still it's progress to what could be a future where ssds are very cheap and also reliable. 

[WereCatf]

3 minutes ago, TheKDub said:

It looks interesting, although it's QLC, and only has a 200TB write endurance.

Personally, I wouldn't see the lower endurance as any sort of an issue. These drives make for great drives for really big Steam-libraries. I mean, the drives would really only see writes when you're installing a game, but after that, it'd all be reads, so the endurance would be entirely irrelevant for well over a decade.

 

I may get one myself as a second drive for my system.

[WereCatf]

1 minute ago, AndreiArgeanu said:

That is true, but I suppose for an average user this write endurance is OK I suppose for 1-2 years maybe, but still it's progress to what could be a future where ssds are very cheap and also reliable. 

1-2 years? What are you babbling about? I'm a heavy user and even I've only managed to rack 10TB writes on my Samsung in 2 years.

[JoostinOnline]

Most Intel SSD's suck for their price point, and a QLC one is probably going to be awful. You can get a 1TB 860 Evo for not much more, and it will be much faster and more reliable.

[TheKDub]

Just now, AndreiArgeanu said:

That is true, but I suppose for an average user this write endurance is OK I suppose for 1-2 years maybe, but still it's progress to what could be a future where ssds are very cheap and also reliable. 

I have only written around 20TB after 1.5-2 years with my 500GB Samsung 850 Evo as my main drive, and I put the drive through a lot.

 

The drive could last 10+ years easily depending on who's using it for what. But it certainly will be much slower when it's being filled up by a bunch of files and programs.

[WereCatf]

3 minutes ago, JoostinOnline said:

Most Intel SSD's suck for their price point

Eh, it depends a lot on where you live. I just checked and the cheapest 1TB M.2 - drive over here is a SATA-one. The second-cheapest is this Intel 660P, but it's an NVME-drive and has better performance than the SATA-one, so it's a lot better for the price-point.

[Chronified]

It'd make a great game drive, turn off pagefile and DON'T use it as your C drive

[mariushm]

It's cheap because QLC is shit, and it's "first gen" of QLC bound to have some issues.

They're making it last the warranty period by switching a part of flash area in pseudo-SLC or MLC mode (i think up to 70-80GB on the 1 TB drives) otherwise drives would probably crap out after less than 100 TB of stuff written to them.

ok to use in let's a console (download 30-50gb game, save to cloud so minimal writes) or drive to dump music and movies (write big files once, pretty much read only afterwards)

[JoostinOnline]

34 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

Eh, it depends a lot on where you live. I just checked and the cheapest 1TB M.2 - drive over here is a SATA-one. The second-cheapest is this Intel 660P, but it's an NVME-drive and has better performance than the SATA-one, so it's a lot better for the price-point.

An NVMe drive isn't necessarily better than a SATA one, and I wasn't limiting it to the M.2 form factor. The smaller form factor is nice, but it's rarely a must. This SSD (along with most Intel ones) has a pretty crappy controller, which leads to poor random read performance. It's true that it's better than a hard drive, but it's still not great.

[LukeSavenije]

I've seen some reviews at anandtech about it

 

I'd rather get a crucial p1 for a little more

[porina]

46 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

Personally, I wouldn't see the lower endurance as any sort of an issue. These drives make for great drives for really big Steam-libraries. I mean, the drives would really only see writes when you're installing a game, but after that, it'd all be reads, so the endurance would be entirely irrelevant for well over a decade.

Agree there. If you need something "better" performing you pay for it, but if you just want a lot of SSD capacity this seems great.

 

Example pricing for mostly 1TB drives at one supplier in UK.

 

M.2 NVMe Intel 660p £108

M.2 NVMe Samsung 970 Evo £218

M.2 SATA Samsung 860 Evo £152

2.5" SATA Crucial BX500 960GB £101

2.5" SATA Samsung 860 QVO £108

2.5" SATA Samsung 860 QVO 2TB £218

 

So basically the Intel is SATA like pricing with NVMe connection. I already use 2.5" SATA SSDs as my game install drives. The Intel would open up NVMe for future builds.

 

26 minutes ago, mariushm said:

They're making it last the warranty period by switching a part of flash area in pseudo-SLC or MLC mode (i think up to 70-80GB on the 1 TB drives) otherwise drives would probably crap out after less than 100 TB of stuff written to them.

That function is used as a kind of write cache to help improve performance. I don't believe it is anything to do with endurance.

[GoldenLag]

performance is apperantly worse than the mx500. which doesnt make it very appealing to pick up. 

 

id pick up a Crucial P1 or a Crucial MX500 over it any day. 

[WereCatf]

16 minutes ago, JoostinOnline said:

An NVMe drive isn't necessarily better than a SATA one, and I wasn't limiting it to the M.2 form factor. The smaller form factor is nice, but it's rarely a must. This SSD (along with most Intel ones) has a pretty crappy controller, which leads to poor random read performance. It's true that it's better than a hard drive, but it's still not great.

In sequential reads, like e.g. most games (which is what I recommended the drive for), it reaches up to 1.4 gigabytes per second -- no SATA-drive can do more than about 550MB/s. Even in 4KB random reads, it manages up to 74MB/s whereas the drive I was comparing to, a WD Blue, goes only up to 66MB/s.

[mariushm]

7 minutes ago, porina said:

That function is used as a kind of write cache to help improve performance. I don't believe it is anything to do with endurance.

I'll give you a hint:

SLC : 30'000 - 100'000 erase cycles

MLC : 4'000 - 10'000 erase cycles

TLC : 1'000 - 3'500 erase cycles

QLC : less than 1'000 erase cycles

 

These are approximate numbers

 

By using a part of the Flash in pseudo-SLC or MLC modes, that flash memory has 20-50x more erase cycles compared to the regular QLC portion of the flash memory. It gives the controller ability to condense together small writes into bigger pages (let's say 128-512 KB chunks)  and delay erasing the QLC pages for as long as possible, only moving stuff from the SLC/MLC area into regular QLC if there's need for more write buffer, and potentially the controller has more time while it's idle to figure out bigger continuous areas of low erase count pages of QLC memory in which to move the newly written stuff.

So instead of burning erase cycles from QLC pages, the life of the SSD is extended by using memory with higher erase cycles.

 

Hence, you get longer "endurance" ... by strategizing how to reduce as much as possible the number of erases of QLC pages.

 

[porina]

3 minutes ago, mariushm said:

So instead of burning erase cycles from QLC pages, the life of the SSD is extended by using memory with higher erase cycles.

 

Hence, you get longer "endurance" ... by strategizing how to reduce as much as possible the number of erases of QLC pages.

It was my understanding it isn't a "fixed" area of the flash that runs in the higher performing mode and the controller would also shift it around as needed to spread the load/wear. As the base capacity requires it to be in QLC, then I'd think you'd still lose QLC levels of endurance per write cycle even if you're writing to it at a lower bit depth. A static area assigned for the higher endurance would run into potential problems of uneven wear.

[mariushm]

48 minutes ago, porina said:

It was my understanding it isn't a "fixed" area of the flash that runs in the higher performing mode and the controller would also shift it around as needed to spread the load/wear. As the base capacity requires it to be in QLC, then I'd think you'd still lose QLC levels of endurance per write cycle even if you're writing to it at a lower bit depth. A static area assigned for the higher endurance would run into potential problems of uneven wear.

Think of it like this:

 

The SSD controller doesn't move the data from SLC/MLC mode memory to QLC right away... it does it when the drive is idle, or when the space is required.

So let's have an example, like let's say you download an 500 MB installer from the net to install something.

The installer unpacks those 500 MB into 700MB - 1 GB in a temporary folder and then you run the setup and install everything somewhere else, and then the installer removes the temporary files and you may or may not delete the installer.

If the drive is not close to full, the SSD drive will have up to around 80-100 GB of NAND in SLC or MLC mode, so those 500 MB (initial download) and those 700MB-1 GB that the installer unpacks will basically reside in the write buffer. The SSD won't move them to the QLC portion yet, because there's plenty of write buffer available and the drive didn't switch to "idle" mode, it's still in active state, having files read and written to it.

Once you're done with the setup and the installer issues the command to remove the temporary files (those 700MB - 1 GB), the controller simply marks the pages holding that data as "available to be erased and reused" and this 700-1GB chunk of data never hits the QLC memory.

Congratulations, you just averted hitting 700MB-1GB worth of blocks with a write (and who knows how many page erases you avoided, because those blocks are in who knows how many pages, because each page may contain tens of blocks and each page may be only partially filled with used blocks)

So instead of killing one erase cycle out of 300-500-maximum 1000 erase cycles available from a QLC page, you're just killing an erase cycle from a SLC/MLC mode page, which has THOUSANDS of erase cycles available. That's how you get more endurance.

 

Yes, the area of memory used in SLC or MLC (I'll say MLC from now on to make it simpler to read) mode is dynamic, if I remember correctly from Anandtech review I think it adjusts between something like 10-20GB to 80 GB, depending on how much space is used on the drive... but I have my doubts about the actual memory areas in each flash memory chip also being dynamic.

I suspect the memory controller reserves up to 8 GB of pages from each memory chip on the drive, where these 8 GB are always the first 0..8 GB out of each 32-64-128 GB chips. When the drive gets full, the controller most likely takes a portion of the write buffer, writes the data from those portions into QLC pages, then erases the MLC pages and converts them to QLC ... like for example ... you have 80 GB of MLC and drive starts to be full, controller may take 1 GB out of each 8 chips (so a total of 8 GB) of MLC pages, write whatever pages are used from those 8 GB worth of MLC pages into QLC pages, erase the 8 GB MLC pages and convert them to QLC, obtaining 16 GB worth of QLC ... now you have 72 GB of MLC mode memory and you gained 16 GB of QLC memory, minus up to 8 GB of data that was previously in the write buffer in those 8 GB worth of pages.

 

[porina]

3 minutes ago, mariushm said:

I suspect the memory controller reserves up to 8 GB of pages from each memory chip on the drive, where these 8 GB are always the first 0..8 GB out of each 32-64-128 GB chips.

I guess we'll never know unless manufacturers do describe their operation mode, or if someone could reverse engineer it from observation. My concern remains that a fixed area for higher performance mode could result in uneven wear leveling. Having it non-static would get around that, but then as argued before, lower density writes would still have the same per-cycle hit to endurance as the fundamental QLC mode. In that scenario I could even argue running lower bit-per-cell modes might even increase wear as measured by TBW because you get reduced write capacity per cycle and I'm not convinced you can gain the higher write cycles if it still has to also run QLC at any time.

 

Anyway, it is getting rather theoretical. I'd have no quibbles running a QLC drive such as this myself. It wouldn't be one I choose for high performance, for example my gaming system has Optane 900p OS drive. For my laptop which is space and thus capacity constrained, if it were available at the time, I'd pick it over similarly priced SATA SSDs.

[JoostinOnline]

2 hours ago, WereCatf said:

In sequential reads, like e.g. most games (which is what I recommended the drive for), it reaches up to 1.4 gigabytes per second -- no SATA-drive can do more than about 550MB/s. Even in 4KB random reads, it manages up to 74MB/s whereas the drive I was comparing to, a WD Blue, goes only up to 66MB/s.

Games don't rely on sequential reads. They access lots of medium to small files. That's why a good SATA drive beats a poor NVMe drive, and why they all crush hard drives.