OCZ Vector 180 - 480 and 960GB SSD review - Product Showcase

The SSD can be opened up easily enough after which the PCB and its components become visible. The controller has a thermal pad applied to it and as such the shell casing helps cooling as well. 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 480 GB capacity. The NAND FLASH partitions are arranged 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 to the controller for fast file write operations. The two 256MB DDR3 DRAM chips operate at 1333MHz.

It's a little hard to read the INDILINX inscription as the thermal padding has been messing with it. The etching has been a little washed out unfortunately, but this is Barefoot 3 IDX500 in the M00 revision. 
 

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 for the bigger 960GB model, it could have up-to 1 GB for 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 480GB model you will spot 8 ICs on each side of the PCB. And check that out, that's the capacitor responsible for the Power Failure Management Plus (PFM+) meaning if the power drops, you will not corrupt the SSD as it can recover. Again, the DRAM cache data will be lost, but the integrity of your NAND partition will remain functional and thus you will not run into a bricked SSD. We love to see that integrated.
 

The drives start to be more price competitive with the 240 and 480 GB models - at roughly 50 cents (USD) / 60 EUR cents per Gigabyte depending on the region where you buy it.