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.


On the PCB you'll find the controller and just one flash chip, a DRAM cache chip is included, too.


Bundled in the package is a small aluminium heatsink. It's attached using adhesive thermal tape—no clamp mechanism or screws like on other drives.


The heatsink looks good and seems to be of high quality.

Chip Component Analysis

The Innogrit IG5236 is the company's first controller to support PCI-Express 4.0. It uses eight channels to maximize transfer rates and is fabricated on a 12 nm process at TSMC Taiwan.


The two flash chips are Hynix 176-layer 3D TLC NAND. They have been rebranded by Essencore. Each chip has a capacity of 1 TB.


One Nanya LPDDR4-4266 chip provides 2 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.