Packaging

The Drive

The drive is designed for the highly compact M.2 2230 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and only 30 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 SSD controller and one flash chip. A DRAM cache is not available.

Chip Component Analysis

Almost nothing is known about the SanDisk 20-82-10081-A1 SSD controller. It is a four-channel design, which obviously supports TLC and DRAM-less operation. It is used on drives like the SN770, SN770M and SN740. It has support for the fast PCI-Express 4.0 interface.


The flash chip is 112-layer Kioxia/Toshiba BiCS5, rebranded by SanDisk, who are now part of WD. WD operates a joint-venture with KIOXIA to produce these NAND chips.