This is the kind of article, that keeps AT at the top of my daily reading list.
While it's technically very neutral and to the point the last paragraph almost sound a bit like good old Charly Demerjan from Semiaccurate, who barely seems to peekt out behind his self-inflicted pay wall any more.
Nice job and I know why my last Intel SSD was a Postville, still running btw.
The interwebs gifted us the nickname of Faillake to describe Skylake, but have they come up yet with a clever name to adequately describe this pricing disaster? QLC-quandry? QLC-quagmire? I honestly don't know who would buy these except for the engineering team and the most ardent fanboys. By the way, the fanboys are very ticked off today by Billy Talis' extremely honest assessment and are downvoting other people as well who are calling the pricing "horrendous."
Looks like AT is alone in talking about the pricing. I typically like HH, but they are way off base on that aspect of their review. That was a bummer to discover.
But for TLC this phase is much shorter, QLC is around for quite a few years, yet it failed to catch on, yeah 670 is crazily priced, but even with 660/665, they never showed any pricing advantage comparing to TLC competitors, I suppose the (rough) theoretical upper limit of 33%(4bpc/3bpc) capacity/price ratio improvement of QLC over TLC is at play here.
Learn some math before posting something. QLC (4 bit) is double the size of TLC (3 bit), not 4/3. So theoretically, the same QLC flash can double the capacity than it is used as TLC. Although in reality, the cost of QLC can not go down to half of TLC, but it should be able to get close in the long run.
He's smoking "math". Lol. 3 bits per cell is 8 voltage states, and 4 bits per cell is 16 voltage states, which is double. If your going to comment with authority on an advanced subject you should learn the basics, and binary math is one of the basics.
Yeah, it doesn't work like that. 3 bits is 3 bits. They hold 8 possible combinations, but they're independent of each other. 4 bits is 33% more than 3.
3 bits per cell is 8 POSSIBLE voltage states, but any given cell can only exist in one of those states at a time. The possible voltage states are not the cell's data storage capacity. The number of bits per cell is the cell's data storage capacity.
"3 bits per cell is 8 POSSIBLE voltage states, but any given cell can only exist in one of those states at a time."
which incites a lower brain stem question: does NAND and/or controllers implement storage with a coding along the lines of RLL or s/pdif (eliminate long 'strings' of either 1 or 0) in order to lower the actual voltages required? if only across logically concatenated cells, so 1,000,000 would store as 1,00X where X is interpreted as 4 0? I can't think of a way off the top of my head, but there must be some really smart engineer out there who has?
Um, voltage states are not storage--it's instead a measure of the difficulty of storing that many bits. QLC is 4 bits per cell, and needs to be able to discern 16 voltage states to store those 4 bits. TLC needs to discern only 8 stages in order to store 3 bits. What that means is that QLC stores 33% more data at the expense of 100% more difficulty. Each bit added doubles the difficulty of working with that data. SLC->MLC was 100% more difficulty for 100% more storage. MLC->TLC was 100% more difficulty for 50% more storage. TLC->QLC was 100% more difficulty for 33% more storage. And QLC->PLC will be 100% difficulty for only 25% more storage.
The 660p initially showed a significant price advantage; I was able to get a 2TB at $180, but it has since disappeared.
That said, in day to day practical use, I haven't seen much difference between a 860 Pro, the 660p and an XPG Gamix X7.
All of them have been considerable faster than my harddrives, and pretty much all of them can feed data faster than my CPUs or network can process it.
I know at some point that will change, and we will see games and consumer software designed to take advantage of the sort of data rates that NVME SSDs can provide, but I'll likely get a dedicated NVME drive for that, when that day comes.
Nope, in my mind TLC is still a cheap toy, fit for a less important machine or maybe a games drive. MLC, 2-bit per cell, is still the right way to go, and QLC is so shit that it should be given away in cereal boxes.
That's good for you, but your opinion is such garbage that even Samsung no longer agree. High-performance TLC drives now outperform the best MLC had to offer, and while you could argue that MLC with the same tech would be faster, the cost involved would make it impossible to sell to anyone outside of the Enterprise market.
Planar TLC is as bad as today's 3D QLC, so no wonder people are criticizing it for roughly the same reasons. The difference is that the NAND cells of 3D flash are much larger, so they can handle both many more electrons and much more wear. Shrink those 3D cells, and QLC can become as bad as we imagine PLC will be.
QLC gets much better at higher densities. The 4TB/ 8TB QLC drives are looking pretty good.
Don't forget a good QLC drive will fold empty space into fast SLC storage. An empty 4TB QLC will give you 1TB SLC. A half full 4TB QLC drive still has about 500GB of SLC tier space available.
the problem is: in due time xLC NAND simply won't exist because the vendors refuse to make any. or if they do, it will be only for niche OEMs or the likes of Google who buy out a year's worth of production. even then, the Enterprise world simply retires stuff at warranty and buys more. not a problem for them, since they get to write off the costs to the American Taxpayer. one might expect QLC/PLC(should it ever exist) SSD to have a warranty that lasts a blink of an eye.
As brands, Intel and Samsung are worth top dollar. I've seen many online discussions where some shockingly overpriced SSDs are recommended, either for "reliability," or without any justification or alternatives being presented.
In other words, I suspect the 670p will sell just fine at that price.
With such products and prices it's good that they are leaving the market. For less you can get much much better TLC M2 which runs around this in circles regarding performance.
The 1TB 665p has been going for $80-90 since last November. The increased performance of the 670 is nowhere near the relative price increase even with the current chip shortages. SSD prices have stagnated for nearly 2 years now. I bought a 2TB Sabrent Rocket for $220 back in July of 2019.
I agree with you, and the way I see it, QLC is supposed to be 2x denser than TLC, so manufacturers should be able to offer a significant discount for a QLC drive instead of a TLC drive. When Intel is selling the 665p for $80-90 it is reasonable for a person to buy QLC, but for $150 it's kinda crazy. At $150 I would recommend the Phison E12 or Samsung 970 Evo / Evo Plus, they have more consistent performance and higher write endurance than the 670p.
They are going 3 bits per cell to 4 bits per cell. That is not double the density but only 1/3 denser.
That said I would expect them to be priced competitively as the 660p are priced. I feel like the 665P were on cleareance and I also picked up a 1TB model for $90.
Eventually they will be priced retail to whatever the market will bear I guess. I was able to pick up a lot of optane 16GB drives for $8-10 recently. I remember when they launched at $40 new...
Thanks for the information, this whole time I was under the impression that MLC has 4 bits per cell, TLC has 8 bits, and QLC has 16 bits. I thought the number of phases per cell is the same as bits per cell. It turns out that MLC is 2 bpc, TLC is 3 bpc, and QLC is 4 bpc. I've been reading about SSDs since 2010, only took me 11 years to figure it out :P
Yeah I want to try Intel Optane as well, I noticed that the 16 GB version is super cheap, I think it's because OEMs were buying them and now they are liquidating their supply. I want the 32 GB version but the pricing is too expensive, I can't justify $70 for a 32 GB Optane drive
Nah, SLC needs to distinguish 2 voltage levels for 1 bit, MLC needs to distinguish 4 voltage levels to read those 2 bits, TLC needs to distinguish 8 for 3 bits etc. Density improvements are going up at a slow pace, while complexity doubles every next step. That's why every next step took longer before it made sense and became successful on the market. We are still at TLC->QLC transition and it seems it will take a while longer before we are close to done. Especially if such overpriced QLC products get launched - you can get a pretty good TLC for the money.
Time will tell but so far QLC hasn't really provided a benefit in most cases for consumers except at possibly the largest size. If you remember back to the planar TLC it was not very popular and didn't work too well either. Going to the 3d flash manufacturing and subsequently going back to much larger lithography as part of that process is what really made TLC usable and popular. I don't see a similar transition coming to help out QLC so we will have to see if it can slowly improve enough to make it worth while for the typical consumer.
The 960EVO did pretty well for TLC and PCIE3, and a QLC drive that can do PCIE4 speeds would do as well IMO. This endurance is about where the 960EVO was... 370TBW vs 400TBW for 1TB. Just get those speeds up, and it would easily be worth the asking price or more. Maybe in another generation or I hope not two.
Fascinating. I have a Netgear GS810EMX connected to an Aquantia AQC-108, and the NIC has issues in Linux when it's receiving lots of data, but works fine in Windows.This requires further research.
My thinking is that the 33% difference on paper is a lot less significant than it looks at first glance, because most consumers won't come close to crossing either limit. If 0.1 DWPD is probably sufficient for your usage and 0.2 DWPD definitely is, then 0.3 DWPD doesn't really have much added benefit.
I bought a Samsung PM9A1 for 115€. What is intel doing with these prices? A 1TB QLC SSD should be the price they're offering here for the 512GB version.
Hey Billy. What is the best 240-256GB NVMe today? I am looking for something under $50 that is the fastest there is currently for system boot times and mixed I/O.
To start with I wouldn't buy a 256GB NVME. Speed scales with size quite well for NVME, and the difference from 256 -> 512 -> 1TB is astounding. Go for a 1TB. This is going to be the fastest drive on your system by far, and more fast space is always useful.
The next thing is make sure you get a drive that folds *all* (or almost all) unused space into SLC space. This means that with an empty 1TB TLC drive, you get 330GB of high-speed SLC space. Smaller drives give you far less cache space. My 1TB is about 500GB full, means I still have about around 150GB SLC storage left. (it's a 2018 Adata SX8200 1TB, non-pro).
Beyond that, eh, from a user perspective they're all roughly equal, look at the table on the last page of the article. Used 1TB NVMe drives are a good buy too, there's not much that can go wrong with them, and if there is, you'll find out on first boot. The only things I would check for in a used working NVME drive is a) total writes, but it's extremely rare for that to be excessively high; and b) run a speed test - if that seems slow, then do a full secure erase and the SSD should be back to full performance, but even that is rarely needed with modern OSes.
USB sticks are used all over the place for booting.
And you get relatively fast µSD-cards which you could combine with a USB reader-stick. A "class 10/A2" rating card can be had at many capacity points where NVMe no longer goes.
I'd say a well used SATA SSD (unless the form factor is not negotiable).
Booting is read-mostly and often not that I/O intensive after all.
And then I generally try to avoid doing it, preferring systems that enable low-power idle or that will sleep. Pressing the power button first and then getting the coffee works wonders, too.
I've never, NEVER seen any QLC drive worth buying. The pricing is always really bad in relation to brand name TLC drives. Even if they were cheaper, it's not worth because of all the drawbacks.
The gain in flash performance is impressive and worth keeping in mind for when Intel will drop the price to something reasonable.
I have used a 1TB P1 in my gaming rig for close to 2 years now and it's solid. Worth keeping in mind most SSDs nowadays come with RAM caching software which hides some of the el-cheapo's disadvantages. Not about to say the P1 is a speed demon, but it doesn't have to be if it has 4GB of RAM buffer. I'd like this drive for the write endurance and 5 years of warranty though, which is a deffinite plus; when it gets below 200$/2TB, preferably below 150 on offer.
First of all: remember that TLC, QLC, etc... are not atemporal constants. They're different ways to build NAND Flash storage. E.g.: Planar TLC is comparable to 3D QLC in a lot of ways.
And QLC/PLC are not inevitable. They could tweak other properties of 3D NAND to enable progress. If they ever find a way to substantially shrink 3D NAND, they'd have to go back to TLC, because otherwise QLC would behave like what we imagine PLC to be.
Second: current 3D QLC is simply good enough for 95% of consumers. Look at these numbers. At the right price, there would be no reason not to buy this if you don't have some kind of professional application which requires consistently high performance storage.
Third: Yeah, please don't buy SSD's from Intel anymore. There's absolutely no benefit to QLC if it isn't substantially cheaper. A Dramless TLC is also good enough for 95% of consumers and it likely won't commit sudoku in a couple of years.
100% behind this comment. I've considered buying Intel's QLC SSDs when I've seen them on sale for substantially less than TLC alternatives, but at retail price, they're a joke.
But my SSDs are tasked exclusively to solve sudoku! What am I supposed to do after a couple of years? Use my worn out NVMe sticks to spread margarine on my pretzels?
It's distressing enough to make one want to commit sudoku!
SN850 should be my next review up. And my SN550 sample arrived yesterday. Test results for that will be in Bench by the end of the week. I'm not currently expecting to do a review specifically of the SN550, but it'll be included in a review planned for next week.
Haven't all of Intel's SSDs come out with a high MSRP and then actually sell for much less? Pretty sure my Sammy Evo drive was cheaper than this 2 years ago though lol.
High launch MSRPs are common for lots of brands, including Intel. But these prices seem especially egregious, though I haven't yet tried to systematically compare the MSRP vs street price gaps for other SSD launches. Even if this launch isn't actually as much of an outlier as it feels like, this is still a bit of a ridiculous business practice, and it's hard not to take these prices at face value when that's what they're actually charging on Newegg, Amazon, etc. I'd love to know how much volume these companies realistically expect to move at inflated prices before aligning with the rest of the market.
But Intel's previous 6-series drives have all eventually made it down to pretty good price points.
It wouldn’t be featured in headlines if it were not.
It’s very important, for instance, that the latest Nvidia card is selling out at $600 despite having a vastly lower MSRP. If you think otherwise you’re simply wrong.
"It’s very important, for instance, that the latest Nvidia card is selling out at $600 despite having a vastly lower MSRP"
Huh? Isn't it exactly illustrate my point? Do not take MSRP seriously, it is retail price that's matter. Same as not focus what someone says, it is what he does (I am not here to defend Intel at all)
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abufrejoval - Monday, March 1, 2021 - link
This is the kind of article, that keeps AT at the top of my daily reading list.While it's technically very neutral and to the point the last paragraph almost sound a bit like good old Charly Demerjan from Semiaccurate, who barely seems to peekt out behind his self-inflicted pay wall any more.
Nice job and I know why my last Intel SSD was a Postville, still running btw.
Hifihedgehog - Monday, March 1, 2021 - link
The interwebs gifted us the nickname of Faillake to describe Skylake, but have they come up yet with a clever name to adequately describe this pricing disaster? QLC-quandry? QLC-quagmire? I honestly don't know who would buy these except for the engineering team and the most ardent fanboys. By the way, the fanboys are very ticked off today by Billy Talis' extremely honest assessment and are downvoting other people as well who are calling the pricing "horrendous."Great_Scott - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
Looks like AT is alone in talking about the pricing. I typically like HH, but they are way off base on that aspect of their review. That was a bummer to discover.A5 - Monday, March 1, 2021 - link
The conclusion here is bang-on. This is a pretty good QLC drive at a terrible price. It needs to be 10 or 11 cents/GB to be a winner.Glock24 - Monday, March 1, 2021 - link
That's more expensive than some good TLC drives 🤷🏻♂️powerarmour - Monday, March 1, 2021 - link
I refuse out of principle to ever purchase a QLC drive.Small Bison - Monday, March 1, 2021 - link
And for this particular drive, it doesn't take much principle to buy a better-performing TLC SSD for less money.Reflex - Monday, March 1, 2021 - link
I remember when everyone said this about TLC, yet here we are...JimmyZeng - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
But for TLC this phase is much shorter, QLC is around for quite a few years, yet it failed to catch on, yeah 670 is crazily priced, but even with 660/665, they never showed any pricing advantage comparing to TLC competitors, I suppose the (rough) theoretical upper limit of 33%(4bpc/3bpc) capacity/price ratio improvement of QLC over TLC is at play here.utferris - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
Learn some math before posting something.QLC (4 bit) is double the size of TLC (3 bit), not 4/3.
So theoretically, the same QLC flash can double the capacity than it is used as TLC. Although in reality, the cost of QLC can not go down to half of TLC, but it should be able to get close in the long run.
Wereweeb - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
What are you smoking? Four bits per cell is indeed 33% more bits per cell than three bits per cell.Bp_968 - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
He's smoking "math". Lol. 3 bits per cell is 8 voltage states, and 4 bits per cell is 16 voltage states, which is double. If your going to comment with authority on an advanced subject you should learn the basics, and binary math is one of the basics.bug77 - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
Yeah, it doesn't work like that.3 bits is 3 bits. They hold 8 possible combinations, but they're independent of each other.
4 bits is 33% more than 3.
Billy Tallis - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
3 bits per cell is 8 POSSIBLE voltage states, but any given cell can only exist in one of those states at a time. The possible voltage states are not the cell's data storage capacity. The number of bits per cell is the cell's data storage capacity.FunBunny2 - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
"3 bits per cell is 8 POSSIBLE voltage states, but any given cell can only exist in one of those states at a time."which incites a lower brain stem question: does NAND and/or controllers implement storage with a coding along the lines of RLL or s/pdif (eliminate long 'strings' of either 1 or 0) in order to lower the actual voltages required? if only across logically concatenated cells, so 1,000,000 would store as 1,00X where X is interpreted as 4 0? I can't think of a way off the top of my head, but there must be some really smart engineer out there who has?
code65536 - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
Um, voltage states are not storage--it's instead a measure of the difficulty of storing that many bits. QLC is 4 bits per cell, and needs to be able to discern 16 voltage states to store those 4 bits. TLC needs to discern only 8 stages in order to store 3 bits. What that means is that QLC stores 33% more data at the expense of 100% more difficulty. Each bit added doubles the difficulty of working with that data. SLC->MLC was 100% more difficulty for 100% more storage. MLC->TLC was 100% more difficulty for 50% more storage. TLC->QLC was 100% more difficulty for 33% more storage. And QLC->PLC will be 100% difficulty for only 25% more storage.Spunjji - Thursday, March 4, 2021 - link
I think at this stage it's also worse than double the difficulty - the performance and endurance penalties are very, very high.HarryVoyager - Monday, March 8, 2021 - link
The 660p initially showed a significant price advantage; I was able to get a 2TB at $180, but it has since disappeared.That said, in day to day practical use, I haven't seen much difference between a 860 Pro, the 660p and an XPG Gamix X7.
All of them have been considerable faster than my harddrives, and pretty much all of them can feed data faster than my CPUs or network can process it.
I know at some point that will change, and we will see games and consumer software designed to take advantage of the sort of data rates that NVME SSDs can provide, but I'll likely get a dedicated NVME drive for that, when that day comes.
RSAUser - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
No one who looked at the actual daily write warranty said that.I've never had a TLC drive file as a host OS drive, only the two times I bought a QLC one after two years.
So my Motto is TLC for host, QLC for mass storage.
yetanotherhuman - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
Nope, in my mind TLC is still a cheap toy, fit for a less important machine or maybe a games drive. MLC, 2-bit per cell, is still the right way to go, and QLC is so shit that it should be given away in cereal boxes.Spunjji - Thursday, March 4, 2021 - link
That's good for you, but your opinion is such garbage that even Samsung no longer agree. High-performance TLC drives now outperform the best MLC had to offer, and while you could argue that MLC with the same tech would be faster, the cost involved would make it impossible to sell to anyone outside of the Enterprise market.bug77 - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
Fwiw, first TLC drives (planar) had about the same endurance as these QLC V-NAND drives. So yeah, same reluctance.Wereweeb - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
Planar TLC is as bad as today's 3D QLC, so no wonder people are criticizing it for roughly the same reasons. The difference is that the NAND cells of 3D flash are much larger, so they can handle both many more electrons and much more wear. Shrink those 3D cells, and QLC can become as bad as we imagine PLC will be.Tomatotech - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
QLC gets much better at higher densities. The 4TB/ 8TB QLC drives are looking pretty good.Don't forget a good QLC drive will fold empty space into fast SLC storage. An empty 4TB QLC will give you 1TB SLC. A half full 4TB QLC drive still has about 500GB of SLC tier space available.
FunBunny2 - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
"I refuse out of principle to ever purchase a QLC drive."well... once the vendors decide that they won't manufacture anything less dense, then what?
powerarmour - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
Simple, they get one less sale from me.FunBunny2 - Thursday, March 4, 2021 - link
"Simple, they get one less sale from me."the problem is: in due time xLC NAND simply won't exist because the vendors refuse to make any. or if they do, it will be only for niche OEMs or the likes of Google who buy out a year's worth of production. even then, the Enterprise world simply retires stuff at warranty and buys more. not a problem for them, since they get to write off the costs to the American Taxpayer. one might expect QLC/PLC(should it ever exist) SSD to have a warranty that lasts a blink of an eye.
brucethemoose - Monday, March 1, 2021 - link
As brands, Intel and Samsung are worth top dollar. I've seen many online discussions where some shockingly overpriced SSDs are recommended, either for "reliability," or without any justification or alternatives being presented.In other words, I suspect the 670p will sell just fine at that price.
ZolaIII - Monday, March 1, 2021 - link
It won't sell or better said you won't have choice when OEM's stick it up to you.ZolaIII - Monday, March 1, 2021 - link
With such products and prices it's good that they are leaving the market. For less you can get much much better TLC M2 which runs around this in circles regarding performance.superjim - Monday, March 1, 2021 - link
The 1TB 665p has been going for $80-90 since last November. The increased performance of the 670 is nowhere near the relative price increase even with the current chip shortages. SSD prices have stagnated for nearly 2 years now. I bought a 2TB Sabrent Rocket for $220 back in July of 2019.XacTactX - Monday, March 1, 2021 - link
I agree with you, and the way I see it, QLC is supposed to be 2x denser than TLC, so manufacturers should be able to offer a significant discount for a QLC drive instead of a TLC drive. When Intel is selling the 665p for $80-90 it is reasonable for a person to buy QLC, but for $150 it's kinda crazy. At $150 I would recommend the Phison E12 or Samsung 970 Evo / Evo Plus, they have more consistent performance and higher write endurance than the 670p.cyrusfox - Monday, March 1, 2021 - link
They are going 3 bits per cell to 4 bits per cell. That is not double the density but only 1/3 denser.That said I would expect them to be priced competitively as the 660p are priced. I feel like the 665P were on cleareance and I also picked up a 1TB model for $90.
Eventually they will be priced retail to whatever the market will bear I guess. I was able to pick up a lot of optane 16GB drives for $8-10 recently. I remember when they launched at $40 new...
XacTactX - Monday, March 1, 2021 - link
Thanks for the information, this whole time I was under the impression that MLC has 4 bits per cell, TLC has 8 bits, and QLC has 16 bits. I thought the number of phases per cell is the same as bits per cell. It turns out that MLC is 2 bpc, TLC is 3 bpc, and QLC is 4 bpc. I've been reading about SSDs since 2010, only took me 11 years to figure it out :PYeah I want to try Intel Optane as well, I noticed that the 16 GB version is super cheap, I think it's because OEMs were buying them and now they are liquidating their supply. I want the 32 GB version but the pricing is too expensive, I can't justify $70 for a 32 GB Optane drive
Zizy - Monday, March 1, 2021 - link
Nah, SLC needs to distinguish 2 voltage levels for 1 bit, MLC needs to distinguish 4 voltage levels to read those 2 bits, TLC needs to distinguish 8 for 3 bits etc. Density improvements are going up at a slow pace, while complexity doubles every next step. That's why every next step took longer before it made sense and became successful on the market. We are still at TLC->QLC transition and it seems it will take a while longer before we are close to done. Especially if such overpriced QLC products get launched - you can get a pretty good TLC for the money.kpb321 - Monday, March 1, 2021 - link
Time will tell but so far QLC hasn't really provided a benefit in most cases for consumers except at possibly the largest size. If you remember back to the planar TLC it was not very popular and didn't work too well either. Going to the 3d flash manufacturing and subsequently going back to much larger lithography as part of that process is what really made TLC usable and popular. I don't see a similar transition coming to help out QLC so we will have to see if it can slowly improve enough to make it worth while for the typical consumer.ichaya - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
The 960EVO did pretty well for TLC and PCIE3, and a QLC drive that can do PCIE4 speeds would do as well IMO. This endurance is about where the 960EVO was... 370TBW vs 400TBW for 1TB. Just get those speeds up, and it would easily be worth the asking price or more. Maybe in another generation or I hope not two.ksec - Monday, March 1, 2021 - link
Yes. I dont mind QLC or even OLC. I want cheaper, and larger SSD.meacupla - Monday, March 1, 2021 - link
So Intel's CPUs are a dudThen their SSDs turned into dud
If intel somehow screws up their network and wifi chips, that will be something to see.
Slash3 - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
*cough*https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/support-hardware...
bananaforscale - Wednesday, March 3, 2021 - link
Fascinating. I have a Netgear GS810EMX connected to an Aquantia AQC-108, and the NIC has issues in Linux when it's receiving lots of data, but works fine in Windows.This requires further research.justaviking - Monday, March 1, 2021 - link
A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE...Billy wrote: "More importantly, at 0.2 DWPD Intel's QLC SSDs aren't that far behind the 0.3 DWPD that most consumer TLC SSDs are rated for."
A 0.1 DWPD difference might not sound like it is "that far behind," but on the other hand that is 33% behind, and 33% *is* significant.
Billy Tallis - Monday, March 1, 2021 - link
My thinking is that the 33% difference on paper is a lot less significant than it looks at first glance, because most consumers won't come close to crossing either limit. If 0.1 DWPD is probably sufficient for your usage and 0.2 DWPD definitely is, then 0.3 DWPD doesn't really have much added benefit.frbeckenbauer - Monday, March 1, 2021 - link
I bought a Samsung PM9A1 for 115€. What is intel doing with these prices? A 1TB QLC SSD should be the price they're offering here for the 512GB version.Machinus - Monday, March 1, 2021 - link
You can still run linux on an X-25E RAID for the next 100 years.MDD1963 - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
Intel does not Eff around when you have used up your allotted writes....; good or bad still, you are damn well done writing once you've used them up!Hifihedgehog - Monday, March 1, 2021 - link
Hey Billy. What is the best 240-256GB NVMe today? I am looking for something under $50 that is the fastest there is currently for system boot times and mixed I/O.Tomatotech - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
To start with I wouldn't buy a 256GB NVME. Speed scales with size quite well for NVME, and the difference from 256 -> 512 -> 1TB is astounding. Go for a 1TB. This is going to be the fastest drive on your system by far, and more fast space is always useful.The next thing is make sure you get a drive that folds *all* (or almost all) unused space into SLC space. This means that with an empty 1TB TLC drive, you get 330GB of high-speed SLC space. Smaller drives give you far less cache space. My 1TB is about 500GB full, means I still have about around 150GB SLC storage left. (it's a 2018 Adata SX8200 1TB, non-pro).
Beyond that, eh, from a user perspective they're all roughly equal, look at the table on the last page of the article. Used 1TB NVMe drives are a good buy too, there's not much that can go wrong with them, and if there is, you'll find out on first boot. The only things I would check for in a used working NVME drive is a) total writes, but it's extremely rare for that to be excessively high; and b) run a speed test - if that seems slow, then do a full secure erase and the SSD should be back to full performance, but even that is rarely needed with modern OSes.
Hifihedgehog - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
My price point was $50 and under so you ignored a key point from the very beginning.abufrejoval - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
USB sticks are used all over the place for booting.And you get relatively fast µSD-cards which you could combine with a USB reader-stick.
A "class 10/A2" rating card can be had at many capacity points where NVMe no longer goes.
abufrejoval - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
I'd say a well used SATA SSD (unless the form factor is not negotiable).Booting is read-mostly and often not that I/O intensive after all.
And then I generally try to avoid doing it, preferring systems that enable low-power idle or that will sleep. Pressing the power button first and then getting the coffee works wonders, too.
Samus - Monday, March 1, 2021 - link
I see Intel still refuses to give up their margins - no matter how uncompetitive or inferior the product may be.Looks like a good drive but the pricing is around 50% too high.
Glock24 - Monday, March 1, 2021 - link
I've never, NEVER seen any QLC drive worth buying. The pricing is always really bad in relation to brand name TLC drives. Even if they were cheaper, it's not worth because of all the drawbacks.Byte - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
where does SSDs have to go from here? OLC? Would that be even possible? Or do we have to wait for the next breakthrough.Zizy - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
PLC - penta-level cell. Each cell keeps 5 values -> 32 voltage levels are required to read that (2^N). It is possible, but it will take a while.dragosmp - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
The gain in flash performance is impressive and worth keeping in mind for when Intel will drop the price to something reasonable.I have used a 1TB P1 in my gaming rig for close to 2 years now and it's solid. Worth keeping in mind most SSDs nowadays come with RAM caching software which hides some of the el-cheapo's disadvantages. Not about to say the P1 is a speed demon, but it doesn't have to be if it has 4GB of RAM buffer. I'd like this drive for the write endurance and 5 years of warranty though, which is a deffinite plus; when it gets below 200$/2TB, preferably below 150 on offer.
Wereweeb - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
First of all: remember that TLC, QLC, etc... are not atemporal constants. They're different ways to build NAND Flash storage. E.g.: Planar TLC is comparable to 3D QLC in a lot of ways.And QLC/PLC are not inevitable. They could tweak other properties of 3D NAND to enable progress. If they ever find a way to substantially shrink 3D NAND, they'd have to go back to TLC, because otherwise QLC would behave like what we imagine PLC to be.
Second: current 3D QLC is simply good enough for 95% of consumers. Look at these numbers. At the right price, there would be no reason not to buy this if you don't have some kind of professional application which requires consistently high performance storage.
Third: Yeah, please don't buy SSD's from Intel anymore. There's absolutely no benefit to QLC if it isn't substantially cheaper. A Dramless TLC is also good enough for 95% of consumers and it likely won't commit sudoku in a couple of years.
Wereweeb - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
Sorry, I meant "different properties to tweak in building NAND storage"Spunjji - Thursday, March 4, 2021 - link
100% behind this comment. I've considered buying Intel's QLC SSDs when I've seen them on sale for substantially less than TLC alternatives, but at retail price, they're a joke.HVAC - Monday, March 8, 2021 - link
But my SSDs are tasked exclusively to solve sudoku! What am I supposed to do after a couple of years? Use my worn out NVMe sticks to spread margarine on my pretzels?It's distressing enough to make one want to commit sudoku!
crimson117 - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
Why in the world would you pay $329 for a 2TB QLC PCIe 3.0 drive?octacore - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
https://www.newegg.com/intel-2tb-670p-series/p/N82...Which is $249 as of this reply. It is actual sale price, that's matter
Spunjji - Thursday, March 4, 2021 - link
That's still at least $50 outside of having a worthwhile cost/performance trade-off, thoughbernstein - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
@anandtech: really missing ssd reviews for the SN550, SN850but as always: GREAT REVIEW !
Billy Tallis - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
SN850 should be my next review up. And my SN550 sample arrived yesterday. Test results for that will be in Bench by the end of the week. I'm not currently expecting to do a review specifically of the SN550, but it'll be included in a review planned for next week.Spunjji - Thursday, March 4, 2021 - link
Great stuff. Thank you!CaedenV - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
Haven't all of Intel's SSDs come out with a high MSRP and then actually sell for much less? Pretty sure my Sammy Evo drive was cheaper than this 2 years ago though lol.Billy Tallis - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
High launch MSRPs are common for lots of brands, including Intel. But these prices seem especially egregious, though I haven't yet tried to systematically compare the MSRP vs street price gaps for other SSD launches. Even if this launch isn't actually as much of an outlier as it feels like, this is still a bit of a ridiculous business practice, and it's hard not to take these prices at face value when that's what they're actually charging on Newegg, Amazon, etc. I'd love to know how much volume these companies realistically expect to move at inflated prices before aligning with the rest of the market.But Intel's previous 6-series drives have all eventually made it down to pretty good price points.
octacore - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
Yeah, just on the 2nd day general availability, NewEgg also marked $25 off from launching fay. Don't take MSRP too seriously,Oxford Guy - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
No. MSRP is serious.We wouldn’t be discussing it if it were not.
It wouldn’t be featured in headlines if it were not.
It’s very important, for instance, that the latest Nvidia card is selling out at $600 despite having a vastly lower MSRP. If you think otherwise you’re simply wrong.
octacore - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
"It’s very important, for instance, that the latest Nvidia card is selling out at $600 despite having a vastly lower MSRP"Huh? Isn't it exactly illustrate my point? Do not take MSRP seriously, it is retail price that's matter. Same as not focus what someone says, it is what he does (I am not here to defend Intel at all)
bananaforscale - Wednesday, March 3, 2021 - link
Overpriced and irrelevant.