Intel announces SSD 665p: denser and faster NAND QLC



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The memory and storage day of Intel held today in South Korea focused mainly on enterprise and data center products, but they announced an upcoming consumer SSD drive: the Intel 665p SSD. It is the successor to the Intel 660p, the first and most popular consumer SSD to use a four-bit NAND flash memory (QLC). The 665p is not a major update: it retains the same Silicon Motion SM2263 4-channel controller but updates the NAND for Intel's 96-layer second generation NAND 3D. This new QLC retains the same capacity of 1024 GB per array while reducing overall chip size. We therefore do not expect any change in the range of available disk capacities or major performance changes, but this may result in lower prices.

Intel introduced the 665p with a live demo between the 1TB 660p and the 1TB 665p prototype with pre-production firmware, each installed in an identical ASUS notebook. Intel used a beta version of CrystalDiskMark 7 to illustrate the performance of the 665p: 40 to 50 percent improvement in sequential transfer speeds and random access speeds about 30 percent faster.

Left: 665p 1 TB pre-production Right: 660p 1 TB
(Photos by Nathan Kirsch of Legit Reviews)

Warnings: Due to the short duration of testing and the relatively low readiness of the drives, these numbers are only measures of SLC cache performance. It's not clear how much the worst-case write speeds for QLC have changed, and it's there that the 660p lies far behind the TLC-based SSDs. The sequential I / O numbers that Intel has shown for the 660p are also well below what we measured with the 660p on our own test bench using CDM 7, so sequential I / O improvement could be closer to 20% than 40% to 50%. Our tests of the Intel 660p also showed that it could reach similar speeds of 1.7 to 1.8 GB / s in sequential transfers with sufficient queue depth. The improvement of the 665p could thus result in an extension of these performances up to the depth of the queue 1. In both cases, it seems that the 665p will be another record offering sufficient performance for most use cases, but not actually requiring the four PCIe lanes.

Nathan Kirsch at Legit Reviews shared his close-up photos of the 665p next to the 660p. So we know that the circuit board structure is essentially unchanged: a one-sided M.2 2280 reader that only needs to populate the four NAND packet slots. for the 2To model.

Intel has not communicated the planned launch date for the 665p, but it should not stay more than a few months. Prices should be comparable to those of the 660p, making it one of the cheapest NVMe consumer discs on the market.

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