Product showcase

And here's the PCB with all SMT soldered ICs. This 6Gbps storage unit makes use of Intel (Micron) 20nm MLC written NAND. There are a number of peculiar 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 (Intel PC29AS21CA0 controller running at 600 MHz), to the right DDR3 memory ICs and at the top the 20nm NAND flash ICs. Most NAND packages are 29F32B08MCMF2 (14 x 32 GiB), but... and this is peculiar, you will also spot a 29F64B08NCMF2 (1 x 64 GiB) and a 29F16B08LCMF2 (1 x 16 GiB). 

That means you get 566 GB of raw flash. Here's the trick, this extra space is used for a parity-based redundancy system; this can make the SSD recover from a failure. Pretty cool if you ask me. To the top right you can see two Micron 512 MB DDR3-1600 DRAM packages, giving this product a whopping 1 GB data cache.

Notice the two capacitors at the top side of the above photo? These function as a power-loss protection mechanism, there are two 105 °C-rated 47 μF capacitors. So if power fails, then the capacitors will deliver power long enough so that all data can been written safely.