News Intel 665p M.2 SSD Gets EoL Date Less Than a Year After Release

Apr 1, 2020
1,394
1,050
7,060
It really is a shame. Despite not packing benchmark topping performance, and getting very sluggish after the SLC cache fills (pretty much only on the initial load), their value couldn't be beat, especially around the $85-$90/TB prices they were often sold for.
 
It really is a shame. Despite not packing benchmark topping performance, and getting very sluggish after the SLC cache fills (pretty much only on the initial load), their value couldn't be beat, especially around the $85-$90/TB prices they were often sold for.
You seem to be thinking of the 660p. I don't believe the refreshed 665p was ever priced that well, as it came at a time when SSD prices were climbing back up a bit. Looking at the price tracking data on PCPartPicker, the 665p never saw a sale price below $110 since it came out a little over 8 months ago. Typically, it has been priced in the $130-$140 range at Newegg, with sale prices sometimes bringing it down to $110-$120, and even less attractive pricing at other retailers. So, significantly higher pricing than the 660p was regularly seeing last summer. And at those prices, there have been similar, or in some cases better drives available from other manufacturers, so it never became to go-to budget option that the 660p had been for much of last year. And this year, the original 660p hasn't really been priced much lower either.

As for performance, the 665p was configured to make a larger portion of the drive available as cache at any fill capacity, and didn't slow down quite as much when that cache was filled, so it was arguably worth a 10% or so premium over the 660p. Unfortunately, it was priced a bit too high at launch, and never really came down enough to make it stand out above the competition.

At the very least, it seems likely that Intel will have a new drive to fill its place, and with any luck that drive might see better pricing and features, so its discontinuation might be a good thing.
 
  • Like
Reactions: cyrusfox
I still wouldn't be interested since it's QLC.
QLC probably isn't going to make that much of a difference for most systems. As far as durability goes, the 1TB 665p's 300TBW rating means that one could write around 80GB to the drive every single day and the flash cells should still last around 10 years at that usage rate, or double that amount for the 2TB model, while the vast majority of people only perform a fraction of those writes each day. Due to wear leveling, the number of available writes per cell isn't as much of a concern at these larger capacities.

And for performance, again, the limited native write speed would only be a concern when you exceed the buffer, but most typical usage scenarios won't often run into that. QLC is probably not ideal for someone planning on rendering out hundreds of gigabytes of video to the drive on a daily basis, or other write-heavy usage scenarios, but for most it should be fine.
 

Shadowclash10

Prominent
May 3, 2020
184
46
610
You seem to be thinking of the 660p. I don't believe the refreshed 665p was ever priced that well, as it came at a time when SSD prices were climbing back up a bit. Looking at the price tracking data on PCPartPicker, the 665p never saw a sale price below $110 since it came out a little over 8 months ago. Typically, it has been priced in the $130-$140 range at Newegg, with sale prices sometimes bringing it down to $110-$120, and even less attractive pricing at other retailers. So, significantly higher pricing than the 660p was regularly seeing last summer. And at those prices, there have been similar, or in some cases better drives available from other manufacturers, so it never became to go-to budget option that the 660p had been for much of last year. And this year, the original 660p hasn't really been priced much lower either.

As for performance, the 665p was configured to make a larger portion of the drive available as cache at any fill capacity, and didn't slow down quite as much when that cache was filled, so it was arguably worth a 10% or so premium over the 660p. Unfortunately, it was priced a bit too high at launch, and never really came down enough to make it stand out above the competition.

At the very least, it seems likely that Intel will have a new drive to fill its place, and with any luck that drive might see better pricing and features, so its discontinuation might be a good thing.
Right. The 660p was the one with insanely good value for the money, often at the $90/1TB mark. I mean, sure, it had it's defects, but it was also a NVME M.2 SSD for generally <$100, and even now, most of those kind of drives start at $120-130. Sadly, the 665p never was as good value, normally around the $110-120 range when on sale.