Packaging

The Drive

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


Like most M.2 NVMe SSDs, the Silicon Power XD80 connects to the host system over a PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface.


A heatsink comes preinstalled, it's basically a relatively thin metal plate attached with thermal tape.


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

Chip Component Analysis

The flash controller is made by Phison. The PS5012-E12S supports TLC, QLC, and PCI-Express 3.0 x4. It uses eight flash channels and is produced on a 28 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. The main difference to the E12 without the "S" is that the E12S is physically smaller, works with half the DRAM capacity of the E12, and uses a metal case, which helps with thermals.


The four TLC flash chips are made by Toshiba, built using 96 layers.


One Xi'an UnilC Semiconductor DDR3-1866L chip provides 512 MB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables in. This is the first time we encounter DDR memory made by UnilC, a Chinese memory manufacturer who inherited its original DRAM IP from Infineon and Qimonda, but is now actively developing their own technologies.