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 chip is included, too.


Crucial has preinstalled a nice-looking metal heatsink on the T500.


While many other drives use screws, Crucial opted for a clipping mechanism that is particularly well engineered and very strong. Note the "holes" in the metal so that the heatsink can't just drift away over time, which would affect heat transfer.


Between the thermal pads and the PCB I found this sticky foil, which helps keep things together.

Chip Component Analysis

The Phison PS5025-E25 is a new Phison PCI-Express 4.0 controller with support for four 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 two flash chips are Micron 232-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 1 TB.


A Micron DDR4-4266 chip provides 2 GB of fast DRAM for the controller to store the mapping tables.