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


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


Corsair's preinstalled heatsink looks good, I like the arrangement of the heatsink structure and the matte, slightly rough, surface of the cooler.


Four screws hold the cooler together.


The Corsair logo is definitely a nice touch.


Slightly larger thermal pads could have helped temperatures, but the difference won't be big.


On the other side a big thermal pad is used.

Chip Component Analysis

The Phison E31 is the company's second PCI-Express 5.0 controller. It supports a four-lane configuration and four flash channels, it's a cost-optimized DRAM-less design. The controller is produced using a 7 nm process at TSMC Taiwan.


The two flash chips are Kioxia 218-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 1 TB.