Product showcase

Open it open and you'll have lost your warranty, so let us do that for you and show what is inside that SSD. And here's the PCB (printed cicuit board) with all SMT soldered ICs. And incredibly small design. The 256GB model uses only eight NAND chips, a DDR3 cache and the controller.

This 6 Gbps storage unit makes use of 20nm MLC written NAND flash ICs. There are a number of interesting things going on with that PCB, let me talk you through that.
 

Above you can see the PCB, the big chip to the left is the controller (Silicon Motion SM2246EN). The IC can be a bit difficult to read be read due to sticky thermal cushions leaving some residue making photography rather hard. The SMI SM2246EN is a lowe power 4-channel controller that, as you will learn, is capable of incredibly high sequential read speeds.

Located to the right from the controller we spot 20nm NAND flash ICs without any branding, dubbed under SKU/product code 60074309. We are confident this is Micron L85 NAND at 20nm. There are eight 32GB packages, four on each side of the PCB.

There is a cache buffer available on the SSD, not huge but very capable, but this is a 128MB Nanya DDR3-1600 DRAM chip.

Typically on the backside of the PCB you'll see SMT traces for more NAND chips, this is not the case for the SSD. They even cut down the PCB sice in half to save on production costs, so I would not expect larger volume sizes anytime soon for this model. 256 GB is the largest model you can purchase.