The Intel SSD 660p SSD Review: QLC NAND Arrives For Consumer SSDs
by Billy Tallis on August 7, 2018 11:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer
The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
The Intel SSD 660p manages an average data rate on The Destroyer that is only slightly slower than the Crucial MX500 mainstream SATA SSD and the Kingston A1000 entry-level NVMe SSD. It's a step up from the performance of the 512GB Intel SSD 600p, and more than three times faster than the DRAMless Toshiba RC100.
The average and 99th percentile latency scores for the Intel SSD 660p are quite poor by NVMe standards and significantly worse than the Crucial MX500, but the latency isn't completely out of control like it is for the Toshiba RC100.
The average read latency from the 660p during The Destroyer is comparable to other low-end NVMe SSDs and better than the 600p or Crucial MX500. The average write latency is more than twice that of the MX500 but lower than the 600p and RC100.
The 99th percentile read latency from the Intel SSD 660p on The Destroyer is significantly worse than any other NVMe SSD or the Crucial MX500 SATA SSD, but the 99th percentile write latency is an improvement over the 600p and does not show the extreme outliers that the Toshiba RC100 suffers from.
The energy usage of the 660p during The Destroyer is a bit better than average for NVMe SSDs, though still quite a bit higher than is typical for SATA SSDs. The 660p is less power hungry than most NVMe drives and slower, but not enough to drag out the test for so long that the power advantage disappears.
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DanNeely - Tuesday, August 7, 2018 - link
Over 18 months between 2013 and 2015 Tech Report tortured a set of early generation SSDs to death via continuous writing until they failed. I'm not aware of anyone else doing the same more recently. Power off retention testing is probably beyond anyone without major OEM sponsorship because each time you power a drive on to see if it's still good you've given its firmware a chance to start running a refresh cycle if needed. As a result to look beyond really short time spans, you'd need an entire stack of each model of drive tested.https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endura...
Oxford Guy - Tuesday, August 7, 2018 - link
Torture tests don't test voltage fading from disuse, though.StrangerGuy - Tuesday, August 7, 2018 - link
And audiophiles always claim no tests are ever enough to disprove their supernatural hearing claims, so...Oxford Guy - Tuesday, August 7, 2018 - link
SSD defects have been found in a variety of models, such as the 840 and the OCZ Vertex 2.mapesdhs - Wednesday, August 8, 2018 - link
Please explain the Vertex2, because I have a lot of them and so far none have failed. Or do you mean the original Vertex2 rather than the Vertex2E which very quickly replaced it? Most of mine are V2Es, it was actually quite rare to come across a normal V2, they were replaced in the channel very quickly. The V2E is an excellent SSD, especially for any OS that doesn't support TRIM, such as WinXP or IRIX. Also, most of the talk about the 840 line was of the 840 EVO, not the standard 840; it's hard to find equivalent coverage of the 840, most sites focused on the EVO instead.Valantar - Wednesday, August 8, 2018 - link
If the Vertex2 was the one that caused BSODs and was recalled, then at least I had one. Didn't find out that the drive was the defective part or that it had been recalled until quite a lot later, but at least I got my money back (which then paid for a very nice 840 Pro, so it turned out well in the end XD).Oxford Guy - Friday, August 10, 2018 - link
Not recalled. There was a program where people could ask OCZ for replacements. But, OCZ also "ran out" of stock for that replacement program and never even covered the drive that was most severely affected: the 240 GB 64-bit NAND unit.BurntMyBacon - Wednesday, August 8, 2018 - link
I believe the problems that plagued the 840 EVO were relevant to the 840 based on two facts. Both SSDs used the same flash. Samsung eventually released a (partial) fix for the 840 similar to the 840 EVO. The fix was apparently incompatible with Linux/BSD, though.Spunjji - Wednesday, August 8, 2018 - link
You'd also be providing useless data by doing so. The drives will have been superseded at least twice before you even have anything to show from the (very expensive) testing.JoeyJoJo123 - Tuesday, August 7, 2018 - link
>muh ssd endurance boogeymanLike clockwork.