Intel SSD 660p 1TB SSD Review With QLC NAND Flash

Intel SSD 660p Power Consumption

The last area we wanted to test is power consumption and for that we have teamed up with our friends at Quarch Technology over in the UK! Legit Reviews now has a Quarch HD Programmable Power Module in-house for testing all SSDs (SAS, SATA and PCIe). This is a fully programmable power supply and measurement tool comes with power injection fixtures that stop power delivery from system, so all power comes from the power module and can be accurately recorded. Each rail can be programmed from 0 to 120% of its nominal voltage and all sorts of advanced power testing can be done.

We used IOMeter to run a 128KB 100% sequential read/write on the drive at a Queue Depth of 2 and recorded the highest power draw recorded.

During our advanced power testing testing we enabled PCI Express Active State Power Management (ASPM) on our desktop board and in Windows 10. Enabling ASPM allows the PCIe link to be slowed down to save power when not being used. When enabling this feature the average idle power of the 660p 1TB drive dropped from 678mW to 350mW, which is great.

Let’s wrap up this review!