Packaging

The Drive

The drive is designed for the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


PCI-Express 4.0 x4 is used as the host interface to the rest of the system, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth compared to PCIe 3.0 x4.


On the PCB you'll find the controller and two flash chips, a DRAM cache is not available.

Chip Component Analysis

This is the first time we've reviewing a drive with Maxio's MAP1602A controller, actually it's our first Maxio-tech review at all. The controller is produced on TSMC's 12 nanometer node and uses several Arm Cortex R5 CPU cores.


The two flash chips are YMTC 128-layer 3D TLC NAND (not 232-layer). BIWIN buys the wafers in bulk, tests and processes the chips, and packages them with their own branding.