Product Showscase
Product Showscase
The following images were taken at high-resolution and then cropped and scaled down. The camera used was a Canon 450D 12 MegaPixel.
And there you have it, the Zotac Sonix PCE-Express SSD (480 GB), it can be easily recognized by the design that yes, does resemble the Intel 750 series. A bit of a bummer I find it to be that the design including PCB which isn't black, that would have looked really nice in an enthusiast grade PC. We will be testing the 480 GB model today. the unit will able to perform at the 2.6 GB/sec marker and is based on a Phison NAND controller. The storage unit is device bootable. During the OS install you can load the unit and work your way through from there on. It is also compatible with the latest UEFI BIOSes.
If you did not get what this product is by now, the unit is a bootable PCIe drive. The NAND itself is based on Toshiba, which is rumored to be the new 15nm. The PCB design is half-height, has an integrated heat-spreader, with a back-plate. It interfaces with your system over PCIe gen 3.0 x4 link.
With controller the SSD is pushing roughly up-to 2.6 GB/s reads, writes however are significan't lower at 1.3 GB/sec but it is nearly a shame to use the word "slower" there. It is of course wahaaaay beyond anything you'd need on your average PC.
The cover comes of easily by removing six screws at the backside. Underneath it the SSD partition, covered up by a heatsink. We'll look into the IC / component usage on the next page.
Here the backside, just four NAND ICs can be spotted here with an empty SMT trace socket for DRAM cache chip. Let's look at the front-side with the heatsink removed though.