Intel’s 670p Asks If The SSD Market Could Use Uno MAS

Check Out Intel’s Memory and Storage Tool

The performance of the new Intel 670p is less important than the price, as Sebastian sagely pointed out.  The performance is as you would expect from a QLC drive, not so good at synthetic benchmarks or sustained writes, but great at the low queue depth reads that are the bread and butter of normal computing.  Unfortunately, the prices don’t quite match the performance.  Ranging from $90 for the 512GB to $330 for the 2TB model, not only it is significantly more expensive than the 660p you can get a variety of 2TB TLC PCIe 4.0 drives for an equal or lesser price.

What was interesting about the launch of the drive was the software that was made available at the same time.  Intel MAS is a utility which offers a variety of tools and information.  It can tell you the current health of your drive’s flash as well as making it quite easy to update your drive’s firmware.  It also provides a one click secure erase tool and a handy performance booster which will immediately clear the SLC cache on the drive when it gets filled during large transfers.  About the only thing that Intel MAS doesn’t do is allow you to clone an existing drive to your new 670p.

Is that addition enough to make you consider the 670p, or is the price per GB just too much for you?