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.


PNY has installed an RGB illumination zone in the center of the drive that's fully software controllable.


On the PCB you'll find the controller and four flash chips, a single DRAM cache chip is included, too.


Unlike other Gen 5 SSDs, PNY's SSD uses an internal USB header for connection with the rest of the system.


PNY's cooling solution uses a clamshell configuration that's supported by four screws, to ensure mounting pressure is good.


There's thermal pads on top and bottom of the SSD. Please note the little temperature sensor (marked red) that's peeking through the thermal pad, to make direct contact with the controller.


This is not your standard dumb heatsink design. PNY has placed a microcontroller in their cooler, which manages the RGB lighting, monitoring, fan control and USB host interface.

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 512 GB.


One Hynix DDR4-4266 chip provides a total of 4 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.