OCZ Vertex 3.20 SSD review

Memory (DDR4/DDR5) and Storage (SSD/NVMe) 367 Page 5 of 17 Published by

teaser

Product showcase

 

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The SSD can be opened up and shows a full-sized PCB with a spacer that spans the drive perimeter. This 6Gbps storage unit makes use of MLC Synchronous NAND. A total of eight NAND flash memory ICs can be spotted on the top side of the PCB. The NAND FLASH partitions are assigned directly to the controller. All the way to the upper left you can see an IC, that in fact is the controller.

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Here we can see the LSI Sandforce 2281, both hated and loved by some. This is an eight-channel controller. The SF-2281 series controller will support up to say roughly 500MB/s sequential read and write speeds, that's a good 62.5MB/s per one of the available eight channels. Combined the bandwidth is just exceptional for a single non RAID drive.

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As stated, the MLC NAND used is 20nm in architecture. A total of 16 NAND flash memory ICs (8 on each side) are present on the PCB. The NAND FLASH partitions are assigned to the SandForce 2281 controller. SandForce, opposed to other controllers, enforces a trick as they can write to the FLASH memory less than the competition needs to by using real time compression. The SF controllers store a representation of your data and not the actual data itself. It does that by using a partition of the available NAND flash memory.

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