Intel 600p review in Spanish (complete analysis)

Before we asked ourselves if acquiring an SSD disk was essential and now that it has been standardized we are considering acquiring an NVMe PCI Express disk to get the most out of our equipment. Intel has released its new Intel 600P disk with really attractive prices and a very interesting read. Is this product really worth acquiring or is it worth going for the serious Samsung 950 EVO?

Or will it not give the desired performance and is a better option to opt for a normal SSD ? All these doubts and more we will solve in this analysis.

This unit has been purchased for testing for you. No manufacturer / store / distributor has transferred us. Without more Let a happy reading begin!

Intel 600P technical specifications

Unboxing and design

The Intel 600P comes to us in a fairly small cardboard box with a design that reminds us a lot of the company's processors with a predominance of blue, once we open the box we find the disc well protected in a plastic blister to avoid any damage.

Once we open the bundle we find:

480GB Intell 600P SSD Drive Warranty Brochure.

We look at the design of the disk and we see that all its components are located on the same side of the PCB.

Intel 600P is the first SSD disk of the company based on NAND TLC 3D memory technology, it is the cheapest NVMe protocol compatible disk that Intel has manufactured so we should expect a performance according to its range. The Intel 600P seeks to push the limits of the SATA interface to deliver great speed without breaking records.

The new Intel 600P has little in common with the previous NVMe disks of the company, this disk leaves out the Intel controllers to bet on a third-party solution, specifically we find a Silicon Motion SM2260 although slightly modified by Intel itself . It is a controller that has proven to offer very good results while keeping prices fairly tight. This controller uses a dual-core ARM processor to achieve very high performance while maintaining very low power consumption, something especially important in notebooks that have limited battery capacity.

As for the NAND memory, 3D TLC technology developed jointly by Intel and Micron is used, it is the same memory that we can find in some SSDs of the mainstream range of the Crucial brand of Micron , for example the MX300 that we will soon analyze. This memory has proven not to be able to achieve the performance of Samsung's NAND TLC 3D and its EVO 850 but it is not far away and in return it can offer a substantially cheaper product.

The disk that we have acquired to increase performance in an ultrabook laptop has been the 512 GB version. She offers us a reading of 1775 MB / s of reading while in writing we have 560 MB / s and a durability of 288 TB of writing. Really enough? Of course!

We currently have capacities of 128 GB up to TB of storage. Each version has different specifications, for this reason we leave its most important characteristics in a table so that you can see the great difference that exists between one model or another. In our case, we have used the 512 GB version.

Intel SSD 600p
128GB	256GB	512GB	1TB
Form factor	M.2 2280
Controller	Silicon Motion SM2260 custom
Interface	PCIe 3.0 x4
NAND	Intel 384Gb 32-layer 3D TLC
SLC Cache	4GB	8.5 GB	17.5 GB	32 GB
Sequential reading	770 MB / s	1570 MB / s	1775 MB / s	1800 MB / s
Sequential writing	450 MB / s	540 MB / s	560 MB / s	560 MB / s
4K reading (QD32)	35k IOPS	71k IOPS	128.5k IOPS	155k IOPS
4K writing (QD32)	91.5k IOPS	112k IOPS	128k IOPS	128k IOPS
Durability	72 TBW	144 TBW	288 TBW	576 TBW
Warranty	5 years

Test and Performance Team (Benchmark)

TESTING BENCH
Processor:	Intel i7-7700K.
Base plate:	Asus Maximus IX Formula.
Memory:	32GB DDR4 Corsair Vengeance LED.
Heatsink	Corsair H100i V2.
HDD	Intel 600P.
Graphic card	Nvidia GTX 1080 8GB.
Power supply	Corsair AX860i.

For testing we will use the native controller of the Z170 chipset on a high performance board: Asus Maximus VIII Formula. Our tests will be performed with the following performance software.

Crystal Disk Mark. AS SSD Benchmark 1.9.5986.35387. ATTO Disk Benchmark 5.1.2.

With the hard disk very full, an irregular writing performance is appreciated, with peaks around 100K IOPS when the controller manages to free some of the SLC cache, to fill up almost immediately and drop to values below 10K, less than many SATA disks. This shows that garbage collection seriously penalizes disk performance , and that we are dealing with a combination of flash memory and controller that, if not for the cache, would have really poor performance. We will have to wait for the disk to completely empty its cache to see the performance announced by Intel, which as in all manufacturers is measured under ideal conditions.

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However, there are solutions that use similar tricks on SATA disks, such as the Samsung 850 EVO, also a relatively slow memory disk (TLC) with similar amounts of SLC cache in which such extreme degradation is not observed. Performance under ideal conditions is not that good, but the worst case scenario is also much less bad.

Final words and conclusion about Intel 600P

The Intel 600P has left us with a rather bittersweet taste, we really did not expect its performance to be so irregular, since as we have previously commented, its garbage collection drastically penalizes.

We remind you that it has a Silicon Motion SM2260 controller in its entire series and our specific model reaches 1775 MB / s for reading and 560 MB / s for writing. Once we pass all our tests we have an actual reading of 1610 MB / s and a much lower write with 447 MB / s . Somewhat below the real thing, but we hardly noticed improvement over a traditional SSD due to its drop in performance, it even works worse.

We recommend reading (almost mandatory) our guide to the best SSDs of the moment.

In short, if your laptop does not allow you to perform an expansion through an M2 NVMe connection, Intel is the cheapest option, but if you want to place it as an SSD in your computer to get the most out of your PC, better opt for a traditional SSD, the Samsung 960 EVO or the new 480GB Corsair M500P.

ADVANTAGE	DISADVANTAGES
+ ALLOWS YOU TO ENLARGE AND IMPROVE A LAPTOP.	- SCRIPTURE RATES ARE ENOUGH MEDIOCRES.
+ READING RATES ARE GOOD.	- GARBAGE COLLECTOR IS NOTHING GOOD AND PENALIZES THE SSD A LOT.
+ IT IS CHEAP.
+ 5 YEARS WARRANTY.

The Professional Review team awards him the silver medal:

Intel 600P

COMPONENTS - 64%

PERFORMANCE - 64%

PRICE - 70%

GUARANTEE - 85%

71%

IT IS A GOOD SOLUTION FOR THOSE WHO ONLY HAVE A M.2 NVMe CONNECTION ON THEIR LAPTOP. ALTHOUGH SEEN ITS PERFORMANCE IS BETTER CHOOSING A LEVEL SATA DISK OR CHOOSING A HIGHER QUALITY NVMe SSD: SAMSUNG, CRUCIAL OR KINGSTON.