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 is pretty much the standard these days, it doubles the theoretical bandwidth compared to PCIe 3.0 x4.


On the PCB you'll find the SSD controller and four flash chips. A DRAM cache is not available.


Acer includes a preinstalled heat spreader on the drive. Unlike other designs it doesn't have a metal foil as core, but some grayish substance.


It looks like Graphite powder that's mixed with some hardening compound.


The heat spreader is quite thin, which means it won't block thermal heat transfer significantly if you put a heatsink on top. On the other hand, the lack of mass means it can't absorb as much heat as thicker designs.

Chip Component Analysis

MaxioTech's MAP1602A controller is produced on TSMC's 12 nanometer node and uses several Arm Cortex R5 CPU cores.


The four flash chips are YMTC 232-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 1 TB.