Samsung 840 EVO SSD review - Product showcase

Now first our apologies to Samsung Netherlands, as we had to sodomize the SSD to get it open. These SSDs use three extremely mini torx screws that are non standard. Two of these screws got damaged and in the end I had to drill them out to open up the product to show you the PCB and ICs.

Once opened up and shows a small half-sized PCB with a plastic spacer that spans the drive perimeter. This 6Gbps storage unit makes use of Samsung's own TLC NAND.  A total of two NAND flash memory ICs can be spotted on the PCB (one at front, one at backside). The NAND FLASH partitions 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 MEX controller. This is a three core controller running at 400 MHz, 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. 

As stated the MLC NAND used is 1x nm in architecture, these are un-listed and unknown, tagged ask9chgy8s5m (we expect 19nm). An interesting fact is that the power consumption of the Samsung SSD is extraordinary low with an IDLE rating of 0.045 Watts and only 0.1 Watts typical power draw when active, regular SSD drives use roughly 2 to 4 watts of power when active, HDDs can pull 5 to 10 Watts. We can see why these SSDs end up on notebooks, as that is a much preferred power consumption.

And yes, Samsung in fact uses some SDRAM, just not for cache. This DRAM is used for mapping tables, working memory, but just not as a write buffer. K4P2G324ED-FGC2 is a 512 MB RAM IC.