Intel 660p ssd with qlc officially released. incredible price but less durable

The battle to see who offers faster, higher capacity SSDs at a lower price is on. After months of various information surrounding it, the Intel 660p has been officially released to the market by Intel.

Intel 660p: QLC memories and kill price, but… reliability?

Intel is crowned in relation to capacity / speed / price with this new SSD, and it is that it is the price of the first thing that we are going to talk about: these M.2 NVMe units will sell for $ 99, that is, less than 100 euros for the 512GB version, the one that interests us most, since this is the approximate price of a SATA SSD with 3D TLC of the same capacity. Let's compare the numbers that Intel offers in terms of performance with what is possibly its biggest competitor, the Samsung 860 EVO:

	Sequential reading	Sequential writing	IOPS Random Read	IOPS Random Write
Intel 660p 512GB (<€ 100)	Up to 1500MB / s	Up to 1000MB / s	Up to 90, 000 IOPS	Up to 220, 000 IOPS
Samsung 860 EVO 500GB (€ 100)	Up to 560MB / s	Up to 530MB / s	Up to 100, 000 IOPS	Up to 90, 000 IOPS

The Intel 660p, unsurprisingly, is considerably faster than the 860 EVO, an SSD limited by the SATA interface. In fact, reviews such as the one on the website Legitreviews have already appeared, corroborating great results, in this case for the 1TB version.

The secret of offering impressive performance with high capacity at such a low price is in the QLC memories, let's see what they consist of.

The NAND flash memories on which the SSDs are based are divided into different cells, which, depending on the type of memory, store a certain number of bits. SLC memories store 1 bit of information in each cell, allowing a maximum of two states (0, 1). These memories are very expensive and are only used as a small cache in some SSDs. MLC memories , 2 bits and four states. TLC, 3 bits and eight states. Finally, we have the new QLC memories with 4 bits and 16 possible states.

This means that QLC memories have the highest data density for each cell, allowing a much lower cost than TLC and MLC. However, this density causes the reliability of the memories to be lower. If many people are already skeptical of using TLC memories in favor of MLC, QLC could be even more questionable. Higher density also means worse performance, although here the 660p offers large numbers for its price, in part thanks to the SLC cache it incorporates.

Specifically, we have compared the durability that the Intel 660p guarantees with the 860 EVO and incidentally the 860 PRO (which uses MLC), and the data is as follows, respectively: 100TBW, 300TBW and 600TBW. It is not more than the warranty given by the manufacturer, it could last more or less, but it is a good indicator of what the QLC implies.

Intel has been the first to launch QLC memories in the domestic market, and other manufacturers will follow in the coming months.

Regardless, there is a 5-year warranty (or up to 100TBW), so it is up to the user to decide to what extent it is a reliable SSD to use. Remember that it is difficult to reach 100TB within 5 years, so it is most likely a really attractive option for home users who will not give it " great use" compared to business customers or store critical data, that is, most of us.

The price of the 1TB unit is $ 199 and that of the 2TB would be $ 400 with 200TBW ( versus 1200TBW of the Samsung 860 EVO and 2400TBW of the PRO , but much cheaper than both ). What do you think, do you think it will be reliable enough? Is the performance extra worth it ?

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