Intel SSD 660p Review: Snappy NVMe Storage At Rock-Bottom Prices

Our Test Methods: Under each test condition, the SSDs tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a separate drive used for the OS and benchmark installations. Our testbed's motherboard was updated with the latest BIOS available at the time of publication and AHCI mode was enabled for the host drive.

The SSDs were secure erased prior to testing (when applicable), and left blank without partitions for some tests, while others required them to be partitioned and formatted, as is the case with the ATTO, PCMark, and CrystalDiskMark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates, and screen savers were all disabled before testing and Windows 10 Quiet Hours were enabled. In all test runs, we rebooted the system, ensured all temp and prefetch data was purged, waited several minutes for drive activity to settle, and for the system to reach an idle state before invoking a test. Also note that all of the drives featured here were tested with their own NVMe drivers installed where possible / available.

HotHardware Test System Intel Core i7 and SSD Powered

Processor - Motherboard - Video Card - Memory - Audio - Storage -

Intel Core i7-8700K Gigabyte Z370 Ultra Gaming (Z370 Chipset, AHCI Enabled) Intel HD 630 16GB G.SKILL DDR4-2666 Integrated on board Corsair Force GT (OS Drive) Toshiba RC100 (240GB / 480GB) Intel SSD 660p (1TB) Intel SSD 760p (512GB) Intel SSD 600p (512GB) OCZ RD400 (1TB) WD Black NVMe (1TB) Samsung SSD 970 EVO (1TB)

OS - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Benchmarks -

Windows 10 Pro x64 Intel 10.1.1.45, iRST 16.0.2.1086 DirectX 12 IOMeter 1.1 HD Tune v5.70 ATTO v3.05 AS SSD CrystalDiskMark v6.0.0 x64 PCMark Storage Bench 2.0 SiSoftware SANDRA

IOMeter I/O Subsystem Measurement Tool

As we've noted in previous SSD articles, though IOMeter is clearly a well-respected industry standard drive benchmark, we're not completely comfortable with it for testing SSDs. The fact of the matter is, though our results with IOMeter appear to scale, it is debatable whether or not certain access patterns, as they are presented to and measured on an SSD, actually provide a valid example of real-world performance. The access patterns we tested may not reflect your particular workload, for example. That said, we do think IOMeter is a reliable gauge for relative available throughput with a given storage solution. In addition, there are certain higher-end workloads you can place on a drive with IOMeter that you can't with most other storage benchmark tools available currently.

In the following tables, we're showing two sets of access patterns; a custom Workstation pattern, with an 8K transfer size, consisting of 80% reads (20% writes) and 80% random (20% sequential) access and a 4K access pattern with a 4K transfer size, comprised of 67% reads (33% writes) and 100% random access. Queue depths from 1 to 32 were tested, though keep in mind, most consumer workloads usually reside at low queue depths...

The Intel SSD 660p 1TB drive we tested finished near the lower end of the spectrum here, with both of the access patterns we tested.

If we focus on available bandwidth and latency at QD1, the Intel SSD 660p 1TB drive we tested trades victories over the 600p in the read / write tests, though it offers more consistent response latency, regardless of workload.

AS SSD Compression Benchmark Bring Your Translator: http://bit.ly/aRx11n