Solidigm SSD 660p 256GB, M.2 2280 / M-Key / PCIe 3.0 x4

Over all, I feel the SSD 6 660p is an excellent value. It may be slower than your traditional NVMe SSD, but the cost savings is well worth the slower speeds. Especially since it’s still faster and cheaper than a SATA M.2. This is a great drive if you’re on a budget or just want some cheap, fast SSD storage.

Given the above caveats and the rarity with which they matter, the 660p's performance seems great for the majority of consumers who have light storage workloads. The 660p usually offers substantially better performance than SATA drives for very little extra cost and with only a small sacrifice in power efficiency. The 660p proves that QLC NAND is a viable option for general-purpose storage, and most users don't need to know or care that the drive is using QLC NAND instead of TLC NAND. The 660p still carries a bit of a price premium over what we would expect a SATA QLC SSD to cost, so it isn't the cheapest consumer SSD on the market, but it has effectively closed the price gap between mainstream SATA and entry-level NVMe drives. Power users may not be satisfied with the limitations of the Intel SSD 660p, but for more typical users it offers a nice step up from the performance of SATA SSDs with a minimal price premium, making it an easy recommendation.

The Intel SSD 660p may not be a consumer class SSD leader in terms of absolute performance, but it does offer some serious bang-for-the-buck. Intel has set the MSRP for the 512GB Intel SSD 660p at $99 and the 1TB model at only $199. Those prices equate to about $0.19 per gigabyte, which is among the lowest prices we've seen for any SSD, let alone a modern NVMe drive that's been tuned specifically for mainstream computing applications. And that's assuming they sell at MSRP -- many of Intel's drives have street prices below MSRP at the moment. If you've got a system with an NVMe slot and are itching for an affordable solid state drive to fill it with, the Intel SSD 660p is worth a hard look for its value proposition alone.