Product showcase

The SSD can be opened up by removing four screws. Once removed it shows a full-sized PCB with a spacer that spans the drive perimeter. This 6Gbps storage unit makes use of MLC Synchronous NAND (SanDisk 19nm, eX2 ABL MLC, 3K P/E Cycles, Toggle). A total of four NAND flash memory ICs can be spotted on the top side of the PCB for this 120GB model. obviously the 240 GB model will have 8 ICs, and the 480 GB version double density NANDs ICs. 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.

Here we can see the Marvell 88SS9187 SSD controller. This is an eight-channel controller. The Marvell Monet 88SS9187-BLD2 is an 8-channel dual core controller. The labeling has been a little washed out unfortunately. This is an eight-channel controller with the ability of a possible 200MB/s per channel throughput, which is just a crazy high value. That is good news for the lower 120GB SKU performance wise. Combined the bandwidth is just exceptional for single non RAID drive. The controller supports TRIM. 

As stated, the MLC NAND used is 20nm in architecture and originates Sandisk themselves, it is Synchronous NAND (SanDisk 19nm, eX2 ABL MLC, 3K P/E Cycles, Toggle). A total of 4 NAND flash memory ICs are present on the PCB of this 120GB model. 

You will also spot a Samsung RAM IC, bringing a whopping 128/256 or 512 MB of cache memory towards to controller for fast file write operations (respectively for the 120/240/480 GB SSD version). The Samsung 128MB DDR3 DRAM chip operates at 1333MHz