Which SSD is better

[kirbydude47]

Is the 660p Intel m.2 pci ssd any good, can't decide on this one (1tb) or the western digital m.2 sata ssd (1tb). Are they both good or is one of them better than the other

[SPARTAN VI]

Do you have links? I'm a bit unclear what SKU you're referring to in regards to the WD model. 

 

The Intel 660p is a NVMe SSD, so it will be much faster on paper than a SATA SSD. For regular consumer workloads, the difference is largely negligible. For gamers, you may shed a second or two in load times. For professional use cases (e.g. video editing), NVMe will be noticeable faster at loading up large projects. 

 

Worth noting that the Intel 660p is M-keyed, so ensure compatibility with your board before you purchase anything. 

[Jurrunio]

25 minutes ago, kirbydude47 said:

Is the 660p Intel m.2 pci ssd any good

No good in operation that read/write a lot of stuff all at once since it will run out of cache and slow down considerably, otherwise it's good.

 

25 minutes ago, kirbydude47 said:

the western digital m.2 sata ssd (1tb).

Green is terribly slow, Blue is decent. SN500 counts as blue. Still slower than NVMe based 660p.

[Senzelian]

 

 

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2 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

Greed is terribly slow, Blue is decent. SN500 counts as blue. Still slower than NVMe based 660p.

Sequentially the Blue is slower, but IIRC the latency is much better and at random reads and writes the difference should be minimal.

[SPARTAN VI]

15 hours ago, Jurrunio said:

No good in operation that read/write a lot of stuff all at once since it will run out of cache and slow down considerably, otherwise it's good.

This is a good point. The Intel 660p primarily has QLC NAND. Basically, it's slower, high density, and cheap consumer-grade flash memory. More information on that here *snaps and points to the corner of the Youtube window*

It does however have a considerable amount of premium very fast SLC NAND, which it relies on for caching. However, this SLC cache gradually shrinks as the drive fills up. So the more the drive fills up, the smaller the SLC cache will shrink. If you ever get to the point where you're writing something larger than the SLC cache can handle, your drive performance will plummet to near harddrive levels (if I recall correctly). 

 

The middle line is the 1TB Intel 660p. In this case, a gamer (like myself) might only hit that SLC cace threshold when installing large games. For that reason, I wouldn't want the drive anywhere near 75% capacity.

 

 

[Jurrunio]

12 minutes ago, Senzelian said:

Sequentially the Blue is slower, but IIRC the latency is much better and at random reads and writes the difference should be minimal.

*until 660p runs out of cache