AMD Radeon R7 Series 240GB SSD review - Product Showcase

The SSD can be opened up easily. To the left you see the SATA 3 connector, to the right you can see an mSATA interface as well. This 6Gbps storage unit makes use of A19nm MLC NAND from Toshiba. A total of 16 NAND flash memory ICs can be spotted on the PCB, they make up for 240 GB capacity. The NAND FLASH partition are arraanged directly towards the controller. All the way to the right you can see one out of two ICs, these are in fact Micron RAM ICs, each bringing 256MB of cache memory towards to controller for fast file write operations. The two 256MB DDR3 DRAM chips operate at 1333MHz.

We can 'barely' read the Barefoot 3 8-channel dual core controller. The etching has been a little washed out unfortunately. This is an eight-channel controller with the ability of a possible 175 MB/s ~ 200 MB/s per channel throughput, which is a really nice value. 
 

Each side of the PCB holds one Micron RAM IC, each bringing 256MB of cache memory towards to controller for fast file write operations. The two 256MB DDR3 DRAM chips operate at 1333MHz, the controller supports TRIM. In the photo above we zoom in a little at the DDR3 memory cache chip from Micron, again there are two of these and the SMT traces show that two more can be installed. So if there is ever going to be a 960GB model, it could have up-to 1 GB or DRAM caching.

As stated several times by now, the MLC NAND used is 19nm in architecture, a batch of Toshiba MLC NAND memory. For this 240GB model you will spot 8 ICs on each side of the PCB.
 

Mind you that AMD is releasing three models (SKUs), the Radeon R7 480, 240 and 120 GB versions. The drives start to be price competitive with the 240 and 480 GB model starting at roughly 50 cents (USD) / 60 EUR cents per Gigabyte depending on the region where you buy it.