Intel's new 660P series SSDs are proving to be quite a hit straight out of the gate, by offering comparable performance to mainstream NVMe SSDs, while being priced like SATA III drives. In tests by major publications, it was able to beat out much more expensive NVMe drives and yet you can pick up a 1TB model for as little as $200.
The big news with Intel's new solid state drives is that they make use of the new 4-bit quad-level cell NAND flash technology. That helps bring down prices while raising capacity and the 660P series is a great example of that. The 512GB model is just $100, while the 1TB model is double that -- that's still far cheaper than the competition. Samsung's 860 Evo is $220, in comparison.
Reviews from HotHardware and PCWorld show that performance doesn't suffer because of that lower price tag. They do fall down with very long, hefty file transfers, to well below typical NVMe speeds, but random access is excellent, and in many cases were comparable to much more costly drives like Samsung's 970 Evo. When it comes to real-world application usage too, the performance difference between Intel's new SSD and some of the competition is almost non-existent.
And this is just the start. While there are only 512GB and 1TB models available for now, there is a 4TB model in the works, which could be the first time we see a truly affordable 4TB SSD made available to the public. While that won't arrive until later this year, it shows the continued trend of crashing SSD prices, which could in years to come make hard drives even less attractive a purchase.
