Tuesday, November 26th 2019
Intel Launches SSD 665p "Neptune Harbor Refresh" Line of M.2 NVMe SSDs
Intel late Monday released its SSD 665p "Neptune Harbor Refresh" line of client-segment M.2 NVMe SSDs. The series was announced in September at the company's Storage Day event in South Korea. Built in the M.2-2280 form-factor, the drives feature PCI-Express 3.0 x4 host interface. They combine a Silicon Motion SMI2263 series controller with Intel's new 96-layer 3D QLC NAND flash memory. The previous-generation SSD 660p series use 64-layer chips. The SMI2263 controller is cushioned by an LPDDR3 DRAM cache.
Intel is debuting the SSD 665p series with just two models, 1 TB and 2 TB, skipping sub-terabyte capacities such as 500 GB. The 2 TB variant offers sequential transfer speeds of up to 2000 MB/s reads and up to 2000 MB/s writes; and random access speeds of up to 250,000 IOPS on both reads and writes. The 1 TB variant offers up to 2000 MB/s sequential reads, up to 1925 MB/s sequential writes, up to 160,000 IOPS random reads, and up to 200,000 IOPS random writes. The company didn't reveal endurance ratings for the drives. The 1 TB variant is priced at USD $125, while the 2 TB variant hasn't yet been priced. Both drives are backed by 5-year warranties.
Intel is debuting the SSD 665p series with just two models, 1 TB and 2 TB, skipping sub-terabyte capacities such as 500 GB. The 2 TB variant offers sequential transfer speeds of up to 2000 MB/s reads and up to 2000 MB/s writes; and random access speeds of up to 250,000 IOPS on both reads and writes. The 1 TB variant offers up to 2000 MB/s sequential reads, up to 1925 MB/s sequential writes, up to 160,000 IOPS random reads, and up to 200,000 IOPS random writes. The company didn't reveal endurance ratings for the drives. The 1 TB variant is priced at USD $125, while the 2 TB variant hasn't yet been priced. Both drives are backed by 5-year warranties.
31 Comments on Intel Launches SSD 665p "Neptune Harbor Refresh" Line of M.2 NVMe SSDs
Sabrent is over $50 cheaper for one, with several of the weirder brands like addlink and Inland being as cheap or cheaper.
Even Silicon Power and PNY, which are at least a B-list rather than a C-list SSD brands, are under $250 on Amazon for much better drives.
Shit, even Corsair's MP510 is "only" $275.
Massive fail here for Intel in terms of pricing.
It looks like SSD prices are warming up.
Obviously MSRP isn't the same as retail pricing, but for a QLC drive, that pricing is simply not competitive. The 1TB 660p is only $83 on Newegg, so even $125 is too much, it should be closer to $100.
I flashed Phison generic firmware onto it...
Corsair has an absolutely horrible Toolbox application. It hasn't been updated in ages and looks like it was made during XP SP2 era...
It's also a buggy piece of s...
I really like my drive but even Adata has better software. -_-
1tb mp510 + 2tb 660P is one of the best combinations i've seen in a long while!
Well if nothing else these should further drive down the price of the 660P. Hopefully someday we can see a 2TB NVME drive for less than $200 Canadian....c'mon BLack Friday!!!
QLC may suck for writes and endurance compared to MLC and TLC but if an SLC cache can hide the write amplifcation and performance issues from users it's still better than, say, buying a TLC SATA drive that will be frequently limited by its 550MB/s SATA bottleneck. At least budget NVMe drives are 3-4x faster than that for the typical bursty consumer use-case.
I'm more concerned about how these hold up as OS drives (with heavier write IO than an application, games drive, or video editing drive) since a common use case is to dump one into the sole M.2 slot of a typical laptop.
It's priced and advertised as a consumer drive that is cheaper than SATA, and faster SATA. It's supposed to be the gateway product to transition people away from the dated, limited SATA and AHCI interface without costing them anything extra.
It succeeds at all of those goals, whilst also being cheaper AND faster. That's a triple-win with no disadvantage. The only cloud on the horizon is that QLC has unknown endurance, hence my question. Nobody wants a repeat of the 840EVO fiasco!
Realistically, few consumers are ever going to be writing to a 660p in anything other than SLC mode. They've just bought one of the cheapest drives on the market and it's effectively an SLC drive to them with quadruple the bandwidth of SATA. What's not to like?
Like the saying goes. There is no bad product. Just wrong price.
For me in the UK, France and Germany I'm seeing the 1TB 660p at about 25% cheaper than the cheapest TLC drive (the ADATA SX6000). If you get lucky with promotions and stock-clearance deals like Kapone did, you can find decent drives undercut the ADATA, but realistically, you're paying 33% more for TLC and that entry-level TLC isn't really any better than the 660p - reads/writes of up to 2100/1500 MB/s. Don't forget, the 660p has seen its fair share of deep discounts and pricing incentives too. I'm just comparing normal MSRPs for now.
If you want fast, good TLC you're probably looking at a WD Black or Samsung 970EVO which is another 20% more expensive on top of that.
2TB should be no more than $199.
Anything higher than that and I'm not looking - especially when there are so many competitors - including intel's own 660p 2TB SSD which I've seen in Microcenter as low as $180
SSD is already significantly better than HDDby default. All I focus on now is price-for-capacity.
... damn, too late.
Inb4 people complaining about QLC because it's new and new things scare them?
Damn again.