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.


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


On the back of the drive a sticker with copper is installed, acting as heat spreader. The front sticker is just thin plastic.

Chip Component Analysis

This is Samsung's new PCIe Gen 4 controller called "Pascal." It is produced on a 8 nm production process in Samsung's foundries.


The two flash chips are Samsung 176-layer V-NAND v7 TLC. Each chip has a capacity of 1 TB.


One Samsung LPDDR4-4266 chip provides a total of 2 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.