Packaging

The Drive

The drive conforms to the dimensions set forth by the 2.5" form factor. It is made out of plastic and is only 7 mm thick, which makes it compatible with notebooks with SATA-support, too.


The Samsung 870 EVO uses the SATA 6 Gbps interface. It is compatible with any older SATA standard, but will in such a case work at reduced performance.


On the PCB, you'll find the controller, four flash chips, and one DRAM cache chip.

Chip Component Analysis

The Samsung "Metis" MKX S4LR059 controller supports both TLC and QLC, it is used on both the Samsung 870 EVO and 870 QVO. It runs with eight flash channels and is fabricated on a 14 nanometer production process at Samsung.


As expected, the flash chip is made by Samsung, too, using V-NAND V6 technology with 128-layers.


A Samsung LPDDR4-1866 chip provides 4 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.