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 5.0 x4 is used as the host interface to the rest of the system, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth compared to PCIe 4.0 x4.


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


Team Group's little M.2 cooler looks pretty awesome, almost like a Steampunk train.


On the bottom you get two heatpipes that move heat away quickly to a bunch of fins, where it is dissipated in the fan's airflow.


A standard 4-pin fan header is used, not the clumsy SATA power connector that we saw on other Gen 5 SSDs. This also means that you can easily control the fan speed through your motherboard.


Included with the cooler are two thermal pads, so you have a spare, just in case.


Also included is a thin metal heat spreader sticker, which could be useful in situations where you can't fit the full M.2 cooler.

Chip Component Analysis

The Phison PS5026-E26 is Phison's first PCI-Express 5.0 controller. It is the company's current flagship with support for eight flash channels and NVMe 2.0, using an Arm Cortex design. The controller itself is fabricated using a 12 nanometer process at TSMC Taiwan.


The four flash chips are Micron 232-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 512 GB.


One Hynix DDR4-4266 chip provides a total of 4 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.