The Intel SSD 600p (512GB) Review
by Billy Tallis on November 22, 2016 10:30 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here.
On the Light test we finally see the 600p pull ahead of SATA SSDs, albeit not when the drive is full. This test shows what the 600p can do before it gets overwhelmed by sustained writes, and it's also the first time where the PCIe 2.0 x2 connection is a significant bottleneck.
The average service times of the 600p rank about where the should: worse than the other NVMe SSDs, but also better than the SATA drives can manage. When the 600p is full its latency is significantly worse and isn't quite as good as Samsung's SATA SSDs, but it is nothing to complain about.
Aside from the usual caveat that it suffers acutely when full, the 600p meets expectations for the number of latency outliers.
The 600p manages to pull ahead of the OCZ RD400 in power consumption and is close to Samsung's NVMe SSDs in efficiency, but the SATA drives are all significantly more efficient.
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Billy Tallis - Thursday, November 24, 2016 - link
They're in Bench now.Flying Aardvark - Friday, November 25, 2016 - link
I have the 1TB 600P and love it. I bought it knowing full well it wasn't a benchmark king. Don't care, low QD performance has hardly improved for quite some time. But at the price, for a 5-year warranty with 0.3% failure rate per year was a no brainer over the 960 EVO for me.I can't get it to slow down or stutter in my case and if you can, you should probably step all the way up to the Intel 750, heatsink intact and all.
crazyowl - Sunday, November 27, 2016 - link
I'm not sure now to formulate this correctly so as not to hurt the reputation of the product, but there's been a report of a 600p burning a motherboard's traces when installed via a DeLonghi adapter card. Anandtech, what could you comment on that issue? Came across it in a review for the 600p at a respectable decent online shop.crazyowl - Sunday, November 27, 2016 - link
Sorry, it was DeLock, not DeLonghi. The latter seems to be a houseware brand.Billy Tallis - Sunday, November 27, 2016 - link
Our testing showed the 600p to be relatively power hungry by the standards of M.2 PCIe SSDs, but it most certainly wasn't drawing enough current to be a danger to any equipment that is capable of safely powering other M.2 PCIe SSDs. Whatever you read about was likely the result of either a manufacturing defect in the board that was supplying power to the M.2 drive, or the result of improper installation leading to a short circuit. I've killed a motherboard through the latter means, but it was only due to the modifications I've made to facilitate measuring PCIe card power consumption.Xajel - Monday, November 28, 2016 - link
I would love to have an NVMe SSD, sadly my system is old (ASUS P8Z77 ) so, it's not able to boot from NVMe.. although nothing is wrong with the chipset it can do it, but ASUS never released any BIOS update, there's some unofficial mod's which can enable this but there's no guarantee it will work or it will brick.el-loc0 - Monday, November 28, 2016 - link
@Anandtec: what equipment do you use to measure power consumption?Billy Tallis - Tuesday, November 29, 2016 - link
For PCIe SSDs, I use a riser card from Adex Electronics with current sense resistors on the 3.3V and 12V supply lines. For SATA SSDs, I use a multimeter spliced into the power cable to measure current directly.el-loc0 - Tuesday, November 29, 2016 - link
Thanks for quick reply, Billy. Do PCIe SSD Draw Power from both lines, 3.3 V and 12 V? Do you use a current clamp or how do you measure on the riser card? Which multimeter do you use?SanX - Thursday, December 1, 2016 - link
Did Intel pay for this BS review?