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  • ddriver - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    Great, now if they could just make a decent NVME SSD as well.
  • ddriver - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    Shame it took them entire 3 years to catch up to the 850 pro. Lets hope they will match the 960 pro before 2020 LOL.
  • eddieobscurant - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    They caught up with the 850 evo, not the pro
  • ATC9001 - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    True...but atleast for the first time in I think...ever, there's a drive that can compete with the EVO...hopefully we can see the EVO drives start to drop a bit.
  • Alexvrb - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    It IS nice to see some serious competition for the Evo. The 850 Evo is still my go-to for upgrading older systems from a mechanical drive.

    Now all I need is some serious price drops for lower-performance higher-capacity TLC drives and I can ditch the mechanical drive for mass storage too. Price:capacity hasn't budged much in recent memory. :-/
  • Impulses - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    Hasn't budged at all... I bought two 1TB EVOs two years ago, almost to the date (Newegg invoice is dated 7/15/2015 for the first one), paid $340 for one and a couple weeks or a month later I managed to get a second one for $320.

    I was hoping two years later I could buy a 2TB drive to add to those for the same kinda money, instead the prices are exactly the same right now. The recent shortage and price hike didn't help, up until that point I remember prices steadily declining for at least 4-5 years straight...

    I guess that couldn't last, historically the flash market has been more volatile (no pun intended) than not, the kind of stability that went on for a couple years aligned with Samsung's rise to SSD dominance were kind of rare in the grand scheme.

    At this rate it's gonna be another 3+ years before I can score a couple good 2TB drives for $300/ea, meh.
  • andychow - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    Nand is in shortage, has been for a few years. In the past, manufacturers would ramp up production, there would eventually be a surplus, and prices would crash. This time around, they've all decided to basically to ride out the shortage by telling their clients to wait.
  • Alexvrb - Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - link

    That seems strange. If they have the ability to ramp and fill demand, you would think one of these outfits would be happy to fill that gap and steal those sales. I thought perhaps they are unable to ramp the flash which is in greatest demand. I hope things get better with future heavily-layered TLC/QLC and upgraded controllers. I would like nothing more than to ditch my secondary mechanical drive for flash, but there's no way I'm spending that kind of money.
  • ddriver - Thursday, June 29, 2017 - link

    There is nothing strange about it, they know if flash is in shortage they will make more on every grain of sand they put into it. It is like an implicit mutual agreement to sustain an artificial shortage to make more money. And everyone is happy.

    They still sell as much SSDs as they can, but at a higher price. SSDs are available, but the supply is deliberately held tight, so there is a perpetual "they might run out" even though supply exceeds demand, it is carefully kept short. Nobody is waiting on flash, no company is missing on sales, they still sell as much as they can, they simply take care not to exceed demand by too much, so they do less work to get extra profits. It is an immensely great deal for them.

    There is no motivation for any of the big players to end this shortage, because that would drive prices down, hurt their own margins and those of everyone else, and give the others an excuse for hostile actions in retaliation, which they don't really want, because even though to us they are apparent competitors, they are all in it for the money, and they have estimated that cooperating to keep supply tight will win them more than competing who will make the most or the best SSDs.

    It sounds like it is illegal, but considering it is all common sense and they didn't have to collude in some dark room to make an explicit agreement to do so, it is perfectly legal as far as the corrupt justice system is concerned.
  • Error415 - Tuesday, October 3, 2017 - link

    Yeah, it should be illegal for a company to decide not drive prices down by flooding the market with cheap products, shm.

    What sounds illegal to you is a text book example of a sustainable business model. No booms or busts just steady growth and profit.
  • ddriver - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    Actually yes. Way to go intel...
  • anactoraaron - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    What's wrong with the 600p? You can get the 512gb from newegg for $179, which make me question the 545s price point. If you aren't limited to sata, the 600p 512gb makes much more sense.
  • ddriver - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    "What's wrong with the 600p? "

    Nothing, aside from the fact it is THE lousiest NVME SSD in the known universe...
  • Drumsticks - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    Good thing it generally sells at SATA prices then...
  • junky77 - Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - link

    It's really not even as fast as SATA SSDs in many tests (I'm talking midrange SSDs, nothing fancy)
  • kaidenshi - Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - link

    I've seen a ton of hate for the 600p here, and I can only conclude that I got extremely lucky with mine and ended up with a fluke. Mine has been hands down the fastest SSD I've ever had, and even paired with a bargain-basement Pentium G4500 CPU, it makes everything on my PC feel instant.

    Perhaps it is the slowest NVMe SSD one can buy, but it is much, much faster than any SATA SSD I've had in this machine. It definitely blows the doors off the 850 Evo, despite claims I've seen here that it's slower. The results on this site mirror what I've seen in my own testing. Basically, the Samsung beats the Intel on random reads only, but loses spectacularly on all other metrics.

    http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Samsung-850-E...
  • Samus - Thursday, June 29, 2017 - link

    It isn't a speed demon, but it isn't slow either. It's just what you'd expect for the price.

    And it's sequential transfer rates are substantially faster than anything SATA, so that is the icing on the cake for an SSD that sells for SATA prices.

    And being Intel, I expect it will be ultimately more reliable than a similar priced product form ADATA, etc.
  • alpha754293 - Thursday, June 29, 2017 - link

    What's wrong with the Intel 750 series PCIe NVMe SSDs?
  • futrtrubl - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    I'm going to assume the sustained sequential write speed of 40MB/s is a typo.
  • futrtrubl - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    Oh wow, I see it is not.
  • t.s - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    But of course, "If you want to play it safe", you could always go for the intel 545s /s
  • DanNeely - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    What happened to the performance consistency testing?
  • Ryan Smith - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    It's coming. But we had a rather short period of time to work on this.

    "This launch comes at a bit of an awkward time for us. I've retired our aging 2015 SSD testbed and moved all the custom and homemade power measurement equipment over to a new system. Windows 8.1 is out and Windows 10 is in, and our IOmeter synthetic benchmarks are being replaced with Linux-based FIO tests that are more suited to modern TLC SSDs with SLC caches. For the past few weeks I've been focusing my efforts on validating the new testbed and test suite against NVMe SSDs, so the arrival at short notice of a new SATA SSD left me with no relevant comparison data."
  • Billy Tallis - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    I didn't have time. I'll be doing it later this week. The new 2017 performance consistency test will be more thorough about testing different overprovisioning amounts, but that also makes it take longer to run.
  • jjj - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    The only interesting part is the rushed launch.
    Is anything much better about to hit the market or is Intel just trying to ship some more NAND in Q2 to "fix" the results? I suppose the Crucial BX300 is due in a couple of weeks, anything else?
  • Billy Tallis - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    Intel wanted to beat WD and Toshiba to market with 64-layer 3D NAND. The Toshiba XG5 is already in the hands of OEMs but I'm not aware of any systems shipping with it yet. WD's 3D NAND SSDs are set to ship in Q3. They're all likely to have more powerful controllers than SM2259, and their charge trap flash cell architecture is closer to Samsung's V-NAND than IMFT 3D floating gate. Intel's right to want to be ahead of the others, but I think they could have spared another week.
  • jjj - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    Another week is no good, July 4th compromises the entire week.
    I was thinking more about value than perf when it comes to beating other new prods but chances are it is also about Q2 results, they want to boost the NAND segment a bit.

    Do you have the Toshiba XG5 for review?
  • Billy Tallis - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    Yes, the XG5 is what got bumped off the testbed to make room for these SATA drives. I'll be switching the testbed back to PCIe drives in a few days, after finishing up a few more tests on this batch of SATA drives.
  • jjj - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    Looking forward to that one.
    With the new tests, do you still look at mixed workloads?
  • Billy Tallis - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    Yes. I'm not planning huge changes to the mixed workload tests, other than testing at 10% increments instead of 20%. My biggest goal with the new test suite is to have things more automated, which makes it easy to increase the level of detail in a lot of the tests (but it also makes it too easy to make the test suite take forever to run).
  • jjj - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    Thanks for the details.

    Guess with this launch, we'll soon have confirmation that they are using string stacking.
  • jjj - Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - link

    Seen this? https://www.wdc.com/about-wd/newsroom/press-room/2...
  • Flashguru - Saturday, July 8, 2017 - link

    So you had the Toshiba NVMe 64layer drive first but bumped it from your testing so you could announce Intel was first to market?
  • JimmiG - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    Great to see some competition for the 850 Evo. Kind of ironic that it should come from Intel, who aren't usually known as the underdogs that provide much needed competition...
  • jimjamjamie - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    "On some tests, the Intel 545s appears to be the first serious challenger to the Samsung 850 EVO's combination of high performance and good power efficiency in a TLC SATA SSD."

    Well now I'm interested. Fingers crossed for decent pricing.
  • MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    Definitely, if it can come under the 850 Evo, I'll have my eye on this drive.
  • halcyon - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    Oh Intel, how far have you fallen. You used to be the innovator, the forerunner.
    Now you're playing catch up and barely managing at that.
    What happened?
  • jimjamjamie - Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - link

    They realised it was more profitable to sell tiny dual and quad core CPUs for hundreds of dollars, add a pin to the socket every few years to sell a new chipset, and add 100MHz to the top end model and sell it for an extra thousand dollars.
  • Retycint - Monday, July 3, 2017 - link

    And add four extra cores for more than twice the price of the original. The X series of CPUs and chipsets were completely scams, up until Ryzen happened.
  • Rictorhell - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    Any idea, at all, on what form factors the m.2 versions will be available in, at launch, or the possible capacities that will be available for those form factors?
  • Billy Tallis - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    I expect it'll be M.2 2280 for all the same capacities, though the 2TB M.2 would probably have to be double-sided. If Intel does a shorter M.2 version it'll more likely be sold as the OEM or embedded model.
  • Rictorhell - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    Thank you for your reply. Yeah, I am looking for a shorter model with a higher capacity than what is currently available. You have given me some hope that something that suits my needs may be released.
  • Glock24 - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    Nice to finally see a competitor to the 850Evo. Hopefully it's not overly expensive.

    Over at Storagereviews they experienced lockups due to firmware:

    "Unstable firmware that causes SSD and attached system to lock under certain repeatable conditions"

    Was your experience similar?
  • Billy Tallis - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    I haven't experienced any lock-ups from the 545s yet, but I would expect the synthetic tests to be more likely to trigger something like that.
  • tigz1218 - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    Can someone explain to me why they still make these? Isn't m2 the better solution with 3,000mbs read/write?

    I am a noob so please go easy, thanks!
  • A5 - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    These are cheaper and there are still a ton of computers that don't have M.2 slots.

    Vast majority of the market doesn't really need something that totally saturates SATA.
  • tigz1218 - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    Cool thank you. I figured it was due to something like that.

    I noticed that difference in price between m2 and SSD isn't as drastic as when SSDs first came out compared to disc drives. Wondering if that means we will see m2 get adopted at a faster rate.

    Thanks again :)
  • Kwarkon - Friday, June 30, 2017 - link

    Hi there, you mean NVME SSD that use usually x4 PCIe with m.2 form factor.
    Because in fact there are also m.2 SATA SSD that perform and cost the same as 2.5" SATA SSD.
  • fanofanand - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    How is M.2 more expensive? It's less hardware, I would assume it's vastly cheaper. They just charge more because it's still "new", but I fail to see how adding the enclosure etc. reduces cost.
  • Tadashi130 - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    Finding a way to route all connections on a smaller PCB is much harder.
  • woggs - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    Once a nand factory is running on a new generation, it has to sell components. The only path out the door for nand is an SSD (for Intel). A product like this gets out quicker and starts the flow. Not a big money maker but gets the factory running in it's early stages.
  • nevcairiel - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    I hope 64-layer TLC brings us closer to more affordable consumer "mass storage" SSDs. I would love to replace my 3TB storage spinning drive with a SSD, but I would need at least that space again - and right now thats still very expensive.
  • MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    That is definitely needed. SSD prices need to continue to decline in order to finally finish off HDD's once and for all
  • HomeworldFound - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    That's going to be a slow process, one the mechanical storage companies are going to want to slow down even further.
  • mkozakewich - Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - link

    Why not a 6TB HDD?

    Mechanical drives look like they'll keep their edge on raw capacity for the foreseeable future. You're best off with a dual system.
  • Drumsticks - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    The SSD 540 was a disappointing product that honestly should have pretty much never been released. It sucked. This one is much better! It's not the best, but it's certainly competitive, and that performance on the destroyer looks great. Kudos to Intel.

    We just need the price to go down. I bought a 512GB Crucial MX100 years ago for $163 on sale. It's crazy how high prices have gotten recently.
  • mkozakewich - Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - link

    Ha, I remember just a few years ago when the prices were hovering around $1/GB! It kind of feels weird to hear people complaining about high prices at 30-40¢/GB.

    Remember the Intel X25-M in 2009 for over $500? For 60 GB? AnandTech covered that by benchmarking application start times compared to HDDs. There was this whole problem with janky SSDs, so they described the problem and ran tests on those other low-end SSDs.
    We've come so far!
  • eddieobscurant - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    The bapco benchmark is useless. The differences are negligible . Please don't include it in the new 2017 benchmark suite.
  • lilmoe - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    Totally disappointed. This just gets a tiny bit closer to the 850 EVO, yet it's a bit more expensive ($20 more for 512GB drives).

    I was hoping Samsung would be under real pressure to lower prices, but this just makes the 850 EVO seem a bit more competitive; it's a bit cheaper, proven for a while to be reliable (ie: a safer bet), and supports more features like encryption.

    Seriously, are they even trying? Hoping some REAL competition is on the way shortly from the others...

    I smell price fixing shenanigans.
  • Impulses - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    It's kind of startling how long the 850 EVO has dominated for... It launched at the end of 2014, over 2.5yrs ago now, and pricing has remained more or less constant for the last 2 years (at least for the 1TB I've bought, same today as in the summer of 2015).

    When has a single storage product ever had that long of a run without a serious challenger? Even Samsung decided to ride it after quickly iterating (and suffering some issues along the way) thru the 430 - 830 - 840.
  • cybertec69 - Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - link

    There is no NANDI shortage, it's all a bunch of nonsense, it's nothing more than price gouging.
  • patrickjp93 - Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - link

    Yes there is. Factories are converting all of their equipment from planar to 3D. It takes time just to move everything, then tune yields, and boost to mass production. On top of that, NAND demand has doubled in the past 2 years. There is a very real shortage.
  • AnTech - Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - link

    How does it compare to the current gold standard (Samsung Portable SSD T3)?

    Samsung Portable SSD T3 is so amazing that keeps cold even when booting Mac and working from it all day long. Really remarkable and amazing!

    BTW, bring much larger sizes of 4 TB and more! And much cheaper prices!
  • Hurr Durr - Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - link

    >portable ssd
    >gold standard

    In what, waiting for the file transfer to finish?
  • mayankleoboy1 - Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - link

    Regarding the "Random read performance" metric as outlined in http://www.anandtech.com/show/9009/ocz-vector-180-...

    Do you think it makes more sense to give 50%:37.5:12.5% weights to QD1:QD2:QD4 , instead of taking simple average?
  • Doubleslash - Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - link

    Can you please do some meaningful IOPS, bandwidth and latency tests with fio or iozone? Things like sustained random 4k/8k/16k IOPS and large-block (64k/256k/512k/1024k) sequential read and write throughput are much better suited to compare wear-leveling, cache and controller performance.
    You can omit these SYSmark test as they are pretty useless. As the result indicates they do not stress the disk subsystem very much.
  • jardows2 - Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - link

    Reviewing these charts, this product falls between the EVO and the MX300, but only slightly better than the MX300. It appears that the only realistic differences between the 545 and the MX300 are seen when the MX300 is full. Who uses their drives full? The current $20 price premium of the 545 over the MX300 doesn't seem worth it for the small gains, unless Intel can improve performance with some firmware updates.
  • Wolfpup - Wednesday, June 28, 2017 - link

    Wish companies would release MLC if not SLC drives too... Really not excited about being stuck with TLC.

    And I'm YEARS past caring about the performance of any of these drives, unless there's something weird about them. I care about reliability.

    Hell, a few of my systems (not main systems, but still) boot if 5400RPM mechanical drives, and are fine. I really don't care if word launches in 0.0001 seconds or 0.0002 seconds or whatever LOL
  • piiman - Saturday, July 22, 2017 - link

    "I really don't care if word launches in 0.0001 seconds or 0.0002 seconds or whatever LOL"

    Blasphemy!
  • alpha754293 - Thursday, June 29, 2017 - link

    I look forward to seeing how it performs on the random write tests...

    I have four Intel 540 series 1 TB SSD drives at home and they're ok. I traded off speed for capacity and cost, and I didn't know that this was launching, so this was sort of a welcomed surprise.
  • shutkajri18 - Thursday, June 29, 2017 - link

    That is a cool SSD but do you wanna check out these hot model then go to /hotwalpapers.com\
  • Oxford Guy - Saturday, July 1, 2017 - link

    "Intel's 600p NVMe SSD is currently only $175 on Newegg. Since the 600p outperforms any SATA SSD for typical real-world desktop use, the 545s needs to do better than 35¢/GB."

    Put the 600p into the performance comparison screens.
  • hanselltc - Monday, July 3, 2017 - link

    So between this and Samsung 850 EVO I simply pick the cheaper one at the time of purchase? All SSD in my house are 850 EVO and I kinda got bored.
  • Adam-James - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link

    It's 2017. Please stop making AHCI SATA drives. At this point we should have long ago transitioned to SATA Express for entry level drives, M.2 for laptop storage, U.2 for high end desktop storage, and NVMe for all of it. Instead the industry's become so complacent that it's looking like we're gonna be stuck in SATA III hell for eternity.

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