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, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth compared to PCIe 3.0 x4.


On the PCB you'll find the controller and four flash chips. The other side of the PCB is empty.

Chip Component Analysis

The Phison PS5021-E21 is Phison's newest PCI-Express 4.0 controller. It's a cost-optimized model, with four flash channels and support for TLC and QLC NAND. Phison has designed the E21 for DRAM-less operation, and it supports the NVMe 1.4 protocol. The controller itself is fabricated using a 12 nanometer process at TSMC Taiwan.


The four flash chips are Micron 176-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 256 GB.