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 SSD controller and four flash chips. A DRAM cache is not available.


Orico includes a heatsink with their drive, it's not preinstalled, so laptop users don't have to remove it before installation.


During installation, I noticed that the thermal tape is a little bit long, so it will stick out under the heatsink—no big deal—better too long than too short.


On my ASUS Z790 Hero, the heatsink wouldn't fit on the first attempt. The silvery clip was making contact with the VRM heatsink (which I already cut off a while ago to make more room). It was not possible to push the SSD down in the M.2 slot, to put in the mounting screw. The solution was to align the SSD near the top of the cooler's metal frame, not in the center—then everything fit fine.

Chip Component Analysis

MaxioTech's MAP1602A controller is produced on TSMC's 12 nanometer node and uses several Arm Cortex R5 CPU cores.


The four flash chips are YMTC 232-layer 3D QLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 512 GB.