General Discussions

[black_zion]

You can read the whole review, but it performs within a spit of the Samsung 970 Evo 1TB and will be basically indistinguishable from it under desktop usage, but at $200 for 1TB, that's $150 cheaper than the 970 Evo and puts all the so called budget NVMe drives, which are just SATA drives on an NVMe format, to shame. GRANTED this is QLC so endurance isn't as high, but I've had my 960 Pro for a year and have written under 10TB to it, so a 200TBW endurance means the drive will easily last until you upgrade to a higher capacity in the next decade.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-ssd-660p-qlc-nvme,5719.html

[black_zion]

Forgot to attach the screenshot of my 960 Pro

[ajlueke]

You might really see that performance plummet when the drive starts to get full, or when writing larger files.

Intel SSD 660p review: Quad Level Cell (QLC/4-bit) NAND makes its debut | PCWorld

[black_zion]

Of course, but we aren't enterprise level users, and this isn't classified as such. Even at 108MB/s of sustained writes that exceeds what Steam or other digital game download services can provide (or heck your entire internet), and on a routine basis you aren't going to transfer gigabytes of files at a time, darn near everything you are going to do is going to be a read or very small write operation which isn't going to overwhelm the drive. That performance for the rare, if ever, time you will be doing massive file transfers is worth it for a drive that's near 50% cheaper than Samsung.

[ajlueke]

That depends on the usage scenario.  The cost of these drives is starting to make them attractive for media servers (my intended use).  You can serve up large files to numerous clients with the excellent read throughput, and the write limitations of QLC is mitigated, as long term storage drives tend not to be written to frequently.  You also bypass the limitations of parts that can fail in mechanical drives, making said data more secure.

However, getting the data to the drives sounds like it might be a bit on the slow side.  Even so, that would just be a one time event.  But still, I have quite a few single files that exceed 50GB in size.

[black_zion]

SSDs are still six times the cost per GB as mechanical, I'd rather have 4-3TB mechanical drives in RAID10 personally.

[ajlueke]

I would agree.  The issue arises when multiple clients are pulling high definition streams at once.  The physical limitations of the platter spinning drives comes into play there.  Getting single SSDs vastly improves the read speed and the number of clients that can be served.  Not sure I want to wait and write all that data though.