ADATA XPG SX950U 240GB SSD review

Memory (DDR4/DDR5) and Storage (SSD/NVMe) 367 Page 5 of 22 Published by

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Product Showcase

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The SSD can be opened up and shows a half size PCB. This 6 Gbps (SATA3) storage unit makes use of Micron TLC 3D NAND. A total of two NAND flash memory ICs can be spotted on one side, and one more on the other (thus three in total) of the PCB for the entire 250GB (physically 256GB), there is provisioning for an SLC write cache. The NAND FLASH partitions are assigned directly to the controller.

   

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Here we can see the a controller chip called "ADATA is using Taiwan SMI Hui Rong company’s N05K81.00 S LLUS TW 1637 4D", basically a rebadged 4-channel SM2258 controller with advanced SLC Caching algorithms for optimal sustained performance with that NAND. And yes, that is an Intel logo on there.
 

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Sitting at its right side is a DDR3L-1600 chip, one for this SSD. That would be a 256MB DRAM cache buffer (1866 MHz). The SSD also makes use of that SLC buffer, and as our tests will show, that covers all bases writing-wise. 

 

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As stated, the NAND is coming from Micron 7WB2D NW852, (64-layer) TLC written. There are a total of three of these chips on the SSD making it a theoretical storage capacity of a 288GB, and a nominal capacity of 240GB. ADATA seems to be reserving 48GB of SLC buffer space, which is massive. As you can see from the SMT traces, there is a space for two more of these memory chips on the top side. These are 3D TLC chips.
    

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