Packaging and Contents

The Drive

The drive uses the M.2 2280 form factor, which means it is 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


Like most M.2 NVMe SSDs, the Samsung 970 EVO uses a PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface.


You will find the SSD controller and two flash chips on the PCB. A single LPDDR4 DRAM chip is also present to provide the SSD controller with operating memory for the mapping tables. The other side of the PCB is empty.


On the back of the PCB, you'll find a thin copper foil, which is used to help spread the heat over a larger area.


The Samsung Phoenix is a new controller for the 970 Series, which now has a metal case to improve thermal performance over the traditional packaging that was used on earlier models.


The two flash chips are Samsung 3D V-NAND with 48 layers of TLC flash. Each chip has a capacity of 256 GB.


A Samsung 512 MB LPDDR4 chip provides fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables in.