Intel preps SSD 665p with QLC for the consumer market

At yesterday's Memory and Storage Day in South Korea, Intel primarily talked about new products for the datacenter and enterprise markets. One exception was the Intel SSD 665p, the chip giant's second QLC NAND flash based product for the consumer market.

This successor to the Intel SSD 660p is not a major update, it uses the same Intel 96-layer QLC 3D NAND memory and Silicon Motion SM2263 4-channel controller as its predecessor. It has the same 1Tb per chip capacity but has a smaller overall die size.

Intel demonstrated the performance of the 665p by pitting it against the 660p. It seems the company was able to deliver some significant gains via further firmware optimization:

Intel used a beta version of CrystalDiskMark 7 to illustrate the 665p's performance: 40-50% improvement to sequential transfer speeds and about 30% faster random access speeds.

Caveats: given the short test duration and relatively empty state of the drives, these numbers are measurements only of the SLC cache performance. It's not clear how much the worst-case write speeds to QLC have changed, and that's where the 660p falls far behind TLC based SSDs.

More details at AnandTech. No word about availability, presumably the 665p will hit the market later this year.



Picture via Legit Reviews