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, two DRAM cache chips are included, too.


Crucial's cooler looks quite solid with lots of surface area, it's a fanless design.


It is held together with four screws, which ensure it doesn't come apart over time. While most vendors use thermal pads, Crucial opted for a different TIM, which is much closer to dots of thermal paste that got squished together. This appears to be a superior solution to thermal pads, because there's very little thermal throttling in our testing, despite the lack of an active fan.

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 1 TB.


Two Micron DDR4-4266 chips provide a total of 8 GB of fast DRAM for the controller to store the mapping tables.