Product Showcase

The SSD can be opened up easily enough after which the PCB and its components become visible. The controller has a thermal pad applied to it and as such the shell casing helps cooling as well. To the left you see the SATA 3 connector, to the right you can see an mSATA interface as well. This 6Gbps storage unit makes use of A19nm TLC NAND from Toshiba. The empty SMT socket is for the 960GB model, there should be an extra DRAM cache chip there.

For the 480 GB version which you are looking at, only 4 NAND flash memory ICs are needed on the PCB, they make up the 480 GB capacity. The NAND FLASH partitions are arranged directly towards the Toshiba controller. All the way to the left you can see the NAND ICs.
 

In the photo above we zoom in a little at the DDR3 memory cache chip from Nanya, there are up-to two of these as the SMT traces show that one more can be installed for the bigger 960 GB model, it could have up-to 1 GB for DRAM caching. As stated several times by now, the TLC NAND used is 19nm in architecture, a batch of Toshiba TLC NAND memory. For this 480 GB model you will spot 4 ICs on this side of the PCB.
 

The drives start to be more price competitive with the 240 and 480 GB models - at roughly 34~40 cents (USD) per Gigabyte depending on the region where you buy it.