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 four flash chips, a single DRAM cache chip is included, too.


Corsair's small cooler looks very solid, with a lot of mass and a tiny little fan inside.


It is held together with four screws, which ensure it doesn't come apart over time. There's thermal pads on the front and back, but I wonder why these are smaller than the actual chips they cover. Still, thermal performance is good.


The cooler is powered through a SATA cable, which is a bulky solution that also makes it difficult to control the fan speed. The actual fan speed is fixed, not temperature controlled. There's also no fan-stop, so the fan is always running, even when idle (but pretty quiet). Some vendors are using a fan cable with PWM header here, which lets you connect the cooler to the motherboard, which enables easy fan control.

Chip Component Analysis

The Phison PS5026-E26 is Phison's first PCI-Express 5.0 controller. It is the company's current flagship with support for eight flash channels and NVMe 2.0, using an Arm Cortex design. The controller itself is fabricated using a 12 nanometer process at TSMC Taiwan.


The four flash chips are Micron 232-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 512 GB.


One Hynix DDR4-4266 chip provides a total of 4 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.