Package and Contents

Inside the package you will find the SSD itself, a USB Type-C cable, and a cable with a standard USB (Type-A) port.

The Drive

ADATA has chosen a clean, stylish look for their external SSD. Personally, I like the blue color, but if you prefer something else, a black version is available, too.


A single USB-C port lets you connect to the drive. Note the small LED to the right of the connector. It lights up blue when the drive is powered on and also serves as a disk activity indicator by turning off the LED while data is written.

Disassembly

Taking the drive apart, we see that ADATA has fully integrated their SSD design onto a single PCB. Other vendors simply put a regular M.2 SSD onto an adapter PCB and stuff that into their external enclosures. Do note the thermal pads that ensure heat is transferred properly to the metal case.


On the PCB we find four flash chips, the controller, and the PCIe-to-USB bridge chip. A DRAM chip is not present.


Innogrit is a fairly young manufacturer of SSD controllers. They were founded in 2016 by people who left Marvell to start their own company. The Shasta IG5208 controller supports NVMe PCIe x2 Gen 3 with four flash channels and is designed to run in DRAM-less operation.


The four flash chips have been rebranded by ADATA. They are 64-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 256 GB.


ASMedia's ASM2362 USB-to-PCIe bridge controller handles all the translation work between the USB-C port and the M.2 NVMe interface on the integrated SSD. It supports USB 3.2 Gen 2 on the USB side and PCI-Express x2 3.0 for attached devices.