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

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Biting the dust

Intel SSD 655p

Intel SSD 655p (Image credit: Newegg)

In what might come as a shock to many, Intel yesterday announced the discontinuation of its Intel SSD 665p. The 665p (codename Neptune Harbor Refresh), which was the successor to the Intel SSD 660p, debuted in November of last year. 

According to Intel's Product Change Notification [PDF], the drives will be available to order until January 31, 2021 with the final shipment date taking place April 30, 2021. 

Intel cooked up the 665p with a similar recipe used in the 660p. The drive arrived with the same Silicon Motion SM2263 NVMe SSD controller with the novelty of Intel's own 96-layer 3D QLC (quad-level cell) NAND chips. Instead of a major overhaul, the 665p was more like a refresh.

The 665p brought better performance and endurance in comparison to its predecessor, but the pricing wasn't as convincing as we had hoped. We don't know why exactly Intel is discontinuing the 665p, but we suspect it's to free up production space for Intel's next generation of QLC drives.

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Product NameProduct CodeMM#
Intel SSD 665p Series (512GB, M.2 80mm PCIe 3.0 x4, 3D3, QLC) Generic Single Pack SSDPEKNW512G901 999GPA
Intel SSD 665p Series (1.0TB, M.2 80mm PCIe 3.0 x4, 3D3, QLC) Generic Single Pack SSDPEKNW010T901 999GPC
Intel SSD 665p Series (2.0TB, M.2 80mm PCIe 3.0 x4, 3D3, QLC) Generic Single Pack SSDPEKNW020T901 999GPD
Intel SSD 665p Series (512GB, M.2 80mm PCIe 3.0 x4, 3D3, QLC) Generic 100 Pack SSDPEKNW512G9 999GPZ
Intel SSD 665p Series (1.0TB, M.2 80mm PCIe 3.0 x4, 3D3, QLC) Generic 100 Pack SSDPEKNW010T9 999GR0
IntelSSD 665p Series (2.0TB, M.2 80mm PCIe 3.0 x4, 3D3, QLC) Generic 100 Pack SSDPEKNW020T9 999GR1
Intel SSD 665p Series (1.0TB, M.2 80mm PCIe 3.0 x4, 3D3, QLC) Retail Box Single Pack SSDPEKNW010T9X1 999HHA
Intel SSD 665p Series (2.0TB, M.2 80mm PCIe 3.0 x4, 3D3, QLC) Retail Box Single Pack SSDPEKNW020T9X1 999HHG

The 665p's retirement shows that Intel is ready to move on to 144-layer NAND. A report from May of this year suggested that the chipmaker's 144-layer QLC SSDs were already in the works. The new drives (codename Keystone Harbor) are reportedly scheduled to hit the markets later sometime this year. The exact time frame is uncertain. Intel aims to bring its entire SSD portfolio on to 144-layer NAND by next year.

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Zhiye Liu
Zhiye Liu
News Editor and Memory Reviewer

Zhiye Liu is a news editor and memory reviewer at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.

5 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Alvar "Miles" Udell
    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.
    Reply
  • cryoburner
    Alvar Miles Udell said:
    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.
    Reply
  • vern72
    I still wouldn't be interested since it's QLC.
    Reply
  • cryoburner
    cryoburner said:
    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.
    Reply
  • Shadowclash10
    cryoburner said:
    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.
    Reply