The Gizzards

Breaking the, warranty void if removed, stickers is not advisable for any end-user, which is why we do the warranty voiding for you here at TechREACTION. Removing 4 screws allows the top of the drive to be removed. 10 thermal pads add protection and heat conducting properties to the NAND and DRAM chips located on the top of the PCB.

Moving the drive enclosure out of the way, the top of the PCB houses the drives storage, cache and power delivery circuitry. 8 Toshiba Toggle NAND Chips take up the majority of the PCBs real estate. However the drives cache is powered by not one, but 2 128MB Nanya 1333 MHz DDR3 ICs. These are 96-ball WBGA ICs running at 9-9-9 timings.

Power control is provided by a number of small surface mount capacitors to increase reliability over the use of a single large super cap. The Octagon shaped chip is a 2.2 micro-H inductor of unknown manufacture.

The NAND chips are built by Toshiba, and are 128Gb (16GB) DDR Toggle-Mode 1.0 operating at 133 MT/s, surprising with many SSDs moving to 166 MT/s. Toggle Mode 2.0 will triple this capability (400 MT/s), but is not expected to be seen until sometime in 2013.

There are benefits to using the Toshiba chips despite the lower performance per chip. No Clock means lower power requirements. It has Asynchronous double data rate capability and Bidirectional DQS for read and write operations. This improves performance as well provides backwards compatibility for legacy NAND controllers.

Another 4 screws mount the PCB to the bottom of the SSD enclosure. Flipping the PCB over we see the remainder of the Power circuitry. A Texas Instruments 4A step down converter suitable for light loads. The large black IC is the SSD Controller, a Marvell 88SS9174.

As mentioned before this controller has been in use for sometime, and was most recently seen on our Crucial M4 SSD review. Not much official information is available on the web, however we did find that estimated speeds for this revision were initial 420 MBps read and 260 MBps write speed. Firm updates have pushed past this however, and it will be interesting to hear from Marvell about the new specifications. The only thing to note, specifically, is its enhanced garbage Collection capabilities making it an ideal controller for Non-Windows setups or RAID configurations were TRIM support is not available, and that it uses DRAM cache instead of extra NAND to handle writes.

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