Product showcase

Open it open and you'll have lost your warranty, never forget that. So let us do that for you and show what is inside that SSD. And here's the PCB (printed cicuit board) with all SMT soldered ICs. And incredibly small design. The 256GB model uses only eight NAND chips, a DDR3 cache IC and the controller.

This 6 Gbps storage unit makes use of 20nm MLC written NAND flash ICs. There are a number of interesting things going on with that PCB, let me talk you through that.
 

Above you can see the PCB, the big chip to the left is the controller (Silicon Motion SM2246EN). The SMI SM2246EN is a low power 4-channel controller that, as you will learn, is capable of incredibly high sequential read speeds.

Located to the right from the controller we spot 20nm NAND flash ICs that originate from Micron but is any branding as it is a custom batch from Angelbird. We are fairly confident this is Micron L85 NAND batch at 20nm. There are eight 32GB packages, four on each side of the PCB.

There is a cache buffer available on the SSD, not huge but very capable, but this is a 128MB Nanya DDR3-1600 DRAM chip. Typically on the backside of the PCB you'll see SMT traces for more NAND chips, this is not the case for the SSD. They even cut down the PCB size in half to save on production costs.