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 - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.
As with the Heavy test, the SLC cache of the Intel SSD 660p is extremely beneficial and brings the average data rate of the 660p up into high-end NVMe territory. When the drive is full and the SLC cache has been reduced to its minimum size, performance suffers and drops below the Crucial MX500 mainstream SATA drive but not all the way down to the level of the Toshiba RC100 DRAMless NVMe SSD.
The best-case latency scores from a freshly-erased 660p are acceptable for a high-end NVMe SSD and excellent for an entry-level drive. In the worst case of a full drive, the average latency is far higher but still low enough that the drive won't actually feel much slower. The 99th percentile latency climbs very high by SSD standards, but is still barely up into the average latency range of hard drives.
On the Light test, the average read latency of the 660p stays comfortably below that of SATA drives even for the worst-case full drive test run, and only the average write latency shows a serious problem from filling up the whole drive and not giving it enough time to empty the now-reduced SLC cache.
The full-drive 99th percentile write latency of the 660p on the Light test is almost as bad as the 600p or the Toshiba RC100. Otherwise, the 660p doesn't have any worrying QoS problems on this test and users won't notice serious pauses from the drive.
The energy usage of the 660p on the Light test is below most other NVMe drives when the test is run on an empty drive, and even with the extra background work and longer test duration of the full-drive test run the 660p is only a little less efficient than the average for this bunch of NVMe SSDs.
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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.