The Intel SSD 660p SSD Review: QLC NAND Arrives For Consumer SSDs
by Billy Tallis on August 7, 2018 11:00 AM EST
anandtech.com
excerpt:
When NAND flash memory was first used for general purpose storage in the earliest ancestors of modern SSDs, the memory cells were treated as simply binary, storing a single bit of data per cell by switching cells between one of two voltage states. Since then demand for higher capacity has pushed the industry to store more bits in each flash memory cell.
In the past year, the deployment of 64-layer 3D NAND flash has allowed almost all of the SSD industry to adopt three bit per cell TLC flash, which only a few short years ago was the cutting edge. Now, four bit per cell, also known as Quad-Level Cell (QLC) NAND flash, is the current frontier.
Each transition to storing more bits per memory cell comes with significant downsides that offset the appeal of higher storage density. The four bits per cell storage mode of QLC requires discriminating between 16 voltage levels in a flash memory cell. The process of reading and writing with adequate precision is unavoidably slower than accessing NAND flash that stores fewer bits per cell. The error rates are higher, so QLC-capable SSD controllers need very robust error correction capabilities. Data retention and write endurance are reduced.
But QLC NAND is entering a market where TLC NAND can provide more performance and endurance than most consumers really need. QLC NAND doesn't introduce any fundamentally new problems, it just is afflicted more severely with the challenges that have already been overcome by TLC NAND. The same strategies that are in widespread use to mitigate the downsides of TLC NAND are also usable for QLC NAND, but QLC will always be the cheaper lower-quality alternative to TLC NAND.
On the commercial product front, Micron introduced an enterprise SATA SSD with QLC NAND this spring, and everyone else is working on QLC NAND as well. But for consumers, where the pricing advantages of QLC are going to be the most noticed, it is Intel who the first to market with a consumer SSD that uses QLC NAND flash memory. Today the company is taking the wraps off of their new Intel SSD 660p, an entry-level M.2 NVMe SSD with up to 2TB of QLC NAND.
Intel has reportedly cut off further development of consumer SATA drives, so naturally their first consumer QLC SSD is a member of their 6-series, the lowest tier of NVMe SSDs. The 660p comes as a replacement for the Intel SSD 600p, Intel's first M.2 NVMe SSD and one of the first consumer NVMe drives that aimed to be cheaper and slower than the premium high-end NVMe SSDs, through the use of TLC NAND at a time when NVMe SSDs were still primarily using MLC NAND. The purpose of the Intel 660p is to push prices down even further while still providing better performance than SATA SSDs or the 600p.
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Conclusion
As the first SSD with QLC NAND to hit our testbed, the Intel SSD 660p provides much-awaited hard facts to settle the rumors and worries surrounding QLC NAND. With only a short time to review the drive we haven't had time to do much about measuring the write endurance, but our 1TB sample has been subjected to 8TB of writes and counting (out of a rated 200TB endurance) without reporting any errors and the SMART status indicates about 1% of the endurance has been used, so things are looking fine thus far.
On the performance side of things, we have confirmed that QLC NAND is slower than TLC, but the difference is not as drastic as many early predictions about QLC NAND suggested. If we didn't already know what NAND the 660p uses under the hood, Intel could pass it off as being an unusually slow TLC SSD. Even the worst-case performance isn't any worse than what we've seen with some older, smaller TLC SSDs with NAND that is much slower than the current 64-layer stuff.
The performance of the SLC cache on the Intel SSD 660p is excellent, rivaling the high-end 8-channel controllers from Silicon Motion. When the 660p isn't very full and the SLC cache is still quite large, it provides significant boosts to write performance. Read performance is usually very competitive with other low-end NVMe SSDs and well out of reach of SATA SSDs. The only exception seems to be that the 660p is not very good at suspending write operations in favor of completing a quicker read operation, so during mixed workloads or when the drive is still working on background processing to flush the SLC cache the read latency can be significantly elevated.
Even though our synthetic tests are designed to give drives a reasonable amount of idle time to flush their SLC write caches, the 660p keeps most of the data as SLC until the capacity of QLC becomes necessary. This means that when the SLC cache does eventually fill up, there's a large backlog of work to be done migrating data in to QLC blocks. We haven't yet quantified how quickly the 660p can fold the data from the SLC cache into QLC during idle times, but it clearly isn't enough to keep pace with our current test configurations. It also appears that most or all of the tests that were run after filling the drive up to 100% did not give the 660p enough idle time after the fill operation to complete its background cleanup work, so even some of the read performance measurements for the full-drive test runs suffer the consequences of filling up the SLC write cache.
In the real world, it is very rare for a consumer drive to need to accept tens or hundreds of GB of writes without interruption. Even the installation of a very large video game can mostly fit within the SLC cache of the 1TB 660p when the drive is not too full, and the steady-state write performance is pretty close to the highest rate data can be streamed into a computer over gigabit Ethernet. When copying huge amounts of data off of another SSD or sufficiently fast hard drive(s) it is possible to approach the worst-case performance our benchmarks have revealed, but those kind of jobs already last long enough that the user will take a coffee break while waiting.
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.
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