Posted by Nathan Kirsch | Wed, Sep 25, 2019 - 9:25 PM

At Intel’s Memory and Storage Day in Seoul, South Korea, we managed to witness the first public demonstration for the upcoming Intel SSD 665P mainstream storage drive. What makes this demo very interesting is that it the first time we’ve seen Intel’s 96-Layer QLC 3D NAND Flash memory in action on a consumer drive.

The live demo had two identical ASUS laptops running CrysalDiskMark 7 Beta 2. One laptop was running the Intel SSD 660p 1TB 64-Layer QLC NAND Flash drive while the other system was running an upcoming Intel SSD 665p 1TB 96-Layer QLC NAND Flash pre-production drive with early firmware.

The Intel SSD 660P 1TB drive was shown to have 1228.62 MB/s of sequential read with 1333.17 MB/s of sequential write performance. The Random 4K performance was 53.81 MB/s read and 151.99 MB/s write. This is the first time that we have seen CrystalDiskMark 7 being used and it now shows the Random 4K read/write microsecond latency of a drive as well as the IOPS. The Intel SSD 660P was showing 76.12 microsecond latency on Random 4K reads and 26.95 microsecond latency writes. Random 4K IOPS was sitting at around 13,000 read and 37,000 write at QD1.

The prototype Intel SSD 665P 1TB drive was shown to have 18816.56 MB/s of sequential read with 1887.50 MB/s of sequential write performance. The Random 4K performance was 70.78 MB/s read and 195.00 MB/s write. The Intel SSD 665P was showing 57.87 microsecond latency on Random 4K reads and 21.00 microsecond latency writes. Random 4K IOPS was sitting at around 17,000 read and 47,000 write at QD1.

So, when you chart that all out you are looking at a 48% performance improvement for sequential read and 42% boost on sequential write. The Random 4K performance jumped up by 32% on the read side and 28% on the write side! Impressive and please keep in drive that this is a mainstream consumer drive targeted at both laptop and desktop users.

These are very impressive performance gains considering both drives are using the same Silicon Motion SM2263 controller! The key difference between these two mainstream drives is the QLC NAND Flash change and of course the needed firmware updates.

We are very excited about the performance numbers from the early Intel SSD 665P samples that were being shown at the Intel Memory & Storage day. The Intel SSD 660p 1TB drive is available for $109 shipped, so expect the new Intel SSD 665P 1TB to hit the market for around that price in the months ahead. Intel sees the Intel SSD 665p series being critical to eliminating hard drives on entry level and mainstream platforms, so expect to hear much more about this drive in the months and years ahead.

Here are a couple close up images of the Intel SSD 665P M.2 PCIe NVMe drive that was on display.