Intel Announces the Launch of SSD 655p, Successor to the SSD 660p

Intel is mainly focused on enterprise and data center products at the memory and storage Day event in South Korea. Intel announced an upcoming consumer SSD, the Intel SSD 665p.

It is the successor to the Intel SSD 660p which is the most successful and the first consumer SSD which uses four bit per cell NAND flash memory (QLC). 

Intel’s 665p is not a major update over the 660p, it still features the same silicon Motion SM2263 4-channel controller, but the NAND is updated to Intel’s second-generation 96-layered 3D QLC NAND. The newer QLC shrunk the overall die size while keeping the same 1024 GB per-die capacity. Apart from a bit lower price, the 665p doesn’t feature any major update.

665 pitted against its predecessor, the 660p

At the event, Intel showed off the 665p with a live demo by pitting the 1TB 660p against the 1TB 665p prototype. Both were installed in identical ASUS notebooks, wig the use of a beta version of CrystalDiskMark 7 Intel illustrated the 665p’s performance. A 30% faster random access speed and 40-50% improvement in sequential transfer speed was noted. Taking the empty states of drives and the short duration of the tests into consideration, we can say that these are just the measurements of the SLC cache performance. 

It’s unclear as to how much the worst-case write speed to QLC has changed, which is where the 660p lacks behind TLC-based SSDs. The sequential IO numbers Intel labeled for 660p is below what has been measured with 660p using CDM7. So, Sequential IO improvement might be around 20% rather than 40-50%. Tests showed that it can reach similar speeds of 1.7-1.8 GB/s in sequential transfer with a high queue depth. So, the 665p might amount to extend that performance to queue depth 1. 655p sure looks like another drive offering good performance for most use cases. 

Noting from the close-up photos of 665p alongside 660p shared by Nathan Kirsch over at Legit Review, we can say that the PCB layout hasn’t changed much, a single-sided M.2 2280 drive that populated all four NAND package locations for 2TB model. Pricing should be lower than that of 660p making it one of the cheapest consumer NVMe drives in the market. Launch dates haven’t been revealed by Intel yet, but we’re guessing it shouldn’t be more than a few months away.

Image Source – Flickr