Intel 660p name m.2

[Nononame]

I managed to get an intel 660p on a great deal (1gb for 80 quid). I was aware this was a budget QLC offering and that the drive wouldn’t last as long as others, but as it was backed by a 5 year warranty I felt ok buying it. Now in hindsight I would have bought a sabrent rocket for a bit more but that’s not an option now.

so, my question (finally) is what should I look for in drive degradation? Will my drive become unstable before grinding to a halt (so to speak) over time or will it be a more sudden thing?

 

[mikedigitales]

You can keep an eye on disk health with CrystalDiskInfo, but I think even the 660p will last years and years and years under normal use.

 

[Nononame]

Awesome - thanks for letting me know about the software, I’ll download that and keep an eye on things.

I’d assumed that the drive would still have a decent lifespan, but read a couple of comments implying that QLC drives should be avoided like the plague...

 

[Avalon]

The issue is one of context. Unfortunately some people have a somewhat simplistic view of life and to them loosing 2/3 of the write endurance has them cowering like a suicidal lemming and yelling ‘Oh Nooo!’ before they explode.

Some numbers to consider for a 1TB 660p:
Write endurance is 200TB.
DWPD is 0.1, that’s over 100GB of writes per day, every day for 5 years.

Realistically very few people will write 100GB in a day, even fewer will do it every day for 1,826.25 days in a row.

 

[tamzzy]

but read a couple of comments implying that QLC drives should be avoided like the plague...

As you are aware, that the sabrent rocket is not much more...with better write endurance.
The reason there are a few members (including myself, I must add) do say to stay away from qlc nand drives is because that the current drives are first gen, so there may - or may not - be reliability issues that haven't been discovered yet (a la Samsung 840 Evo losing nand charge and read speeds dropping to crap)
And also, depending on what kind of workload, qlc nand drives' write speed drops to crap once the SLC buffer runs out.
In your case, if you got the 660p for £80, that's a decent % off compared to the £110 of sabrent rocket. Normally the 660p goes for £95-100 which isn't worth it compared to the sabrent