Today we will be looking at the world’s first consumer SSD to feature QLC (Quad Level Cell) NAND Flash. QLC NAND Flash once seemed so far away, but Intel is rolling out the SSD 660p drive series today. The Intel SSD 660p features an SMI controller with Intel firmware optimizations and IMFT 3D 64-layer QLC NAND Flash memory. The Intel SSD 660p series is available in 512GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities and all will be M.2 PCIe NVME drives. Intel is not releasing a SATA III drive with QLC NAND Flash memory at this point in time. We see this as a positive move as we need to speed up the transition from the SATA III interface to PCIe NVMe on mainstream products.

Performance for the 660p drive series is up to 1800 MB/s for sequential read and writes and up 220,000 IOPS for 4K Random read and writes. These aren’t record breaking speeds for a PCIe NVMe drive, but respectable for an entry-level PCIe NVMe product. Intel is also using Dynamic SLC cache to help ensure the best sequential write performance during large file writes. This is the first consumer drive to use fully dynamic SLC cache, so we’ll be talking about that more in-depth and testing it out for ourselves.