Intel's 600p Series SSD has been released a while ago, but is still an important drive both on the market and as a good reference for comparisons against other NVMe drives. The drive is powered by a Silicon Motion SM2260 controller and Micron 3D TLC flash; the same configuration as the ADATA Gammix S10 we reviewed last week. In terms of positioning, the 600p is categorized as an entry-level NVMe drive that promises to go beyond what SATA SSDs are capable of.

In our real-life performance testing, we see good results from the 600p, which are, surprisingly, a bit lower than those of the Gammix S10, which uses nearly the same hardware. Other competing M.2 NVMe drives are about in the same ballpark, though, and SATA drives are not far behind. When looking at our synthetic benchmarks, the drive can't impress at all, which is due to the choice to go with TLC flash memory. TLC chips reduce cost by storing data more efficiently, but do so at the cost of write performance. Intel is using DRAM and pseudo-SLC caching on the drive to mitigate this effect. According to our testing, the drive can soak up write bursts of up to 16 GB at full speed, which explains the good results in our real-life testing. No consumer application will write that much data in such a short time, so real-life performance isn't affected. Synthetics, however, will hammer the drive with a much higher workload and can thus paint the wrong picture. Still, I wouldn't recommend the 600p for a high-end workstation setup since MLC-based drives remain a better choice there; for everyday consumer workloads, the 600p is a decent choice, though.

Unlike many other PCIe NVMe drives, the 600p lacks a heatsink, which isn't a big deal because the drive doesn't really get that warm. Reads are no problem at all, and writes are relatively slow, so the controller doesn't get as hot. In our testing it took us 9 minutes of non-stop writes at maximum drive speed to reach throttling—a scenario that's very unlikely for a consumer system.

With a price of $220, the Intel 600p is slightly more expensive than the competition from ADATA, but overall, it's priced very reasonably. You get a solid drive that's backed by the biggest player in the market, which means support and RMA (if needed) should be top-notch. I also want to believe that Intel, with their near infinite resources, did more rigorous testing than other SSD makers, which might help avoid rare bugs. Serious competition comes from Samsung in the form of the 960 EVO, which uses TLC flash as well, comes at a slightly lower price point, but has a less usable capacity (500 GB vs. 512 GB). You can also find cheaper M.2 drives on the market, but these use a much slower M.2 SATA interface, recognizable by the two notches on the connector. If you spend a few more bucks, you can get an MLC drive, which comes with better write performance, performance you probably don't need anyway (unless you write more than 20 GB in a short time).