Samsung 840 Pro SSD review - Product showcase

The SSD can be opened up and shows a full-sized PCB with a plastic spacer that spans the drive perimeter. This 6Gbps storage unit makes use of Samsung's own MLC Synchronous NAND. 

At total of eight NAND flash memory ICs can be spotted on the PCB. The NAND FLASH partition are assigned directly to the controller. All the way to the upper left you can see two ICs, these are in fact a RAM IC and the controller.

Here we can see the triple core MDX controller. This is an eight-channel controller with the ability of a possible 175~200MB/s per channel throughput, which is a really high value yet becoming the norm for enthusiast class SSDs anno 2012/2013. 

In the photo above we zoom in a little at the DDR3 memory cache chip from Samsung.

As stated the MLC NAND used is 20nm in architecture. An interesting fact is that the power consumption of the Samsung SSD is extraordinary low with an IDLE rating of 0.042 watts and only 0.068 watts when active, regular SSD drives use roughly 2 to 4 watts of power when active. We can see why these SSDs end up on notebooks, as that is a much preferred power consumption.