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 not installed.

Chip Component Analysis

The Silicon Motion SM2268XT2 is a new design from SMI, which has support for DRAM-less operation with HMB, using a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 NVMe 2.0 interface. Four NAND channels are available at speeds up to 3600 MT/s. The controller is produced using a 12 nanometer production process at TSMC Taiwan. Compared to SM2268XT, the XT2 is a slightly improved version, on a more energy-efficient process, with support for higher memory clocks.


The four flash chips are Kioxia 162-layer 3D QLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 1 TB.