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.


MSI's cooler is a big and impressive design that comes with three heatpipes.


After taking the unit apart, you can see how they integrated the heatpipes in the cooler. Four screws on the sides ensure that contact is always strong, even after prolonged use.

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