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.


The sticker comes with a gray substance inside, looks like graphite to me. There is definitely no metal foil, so the heat spreading capabilities are limited.

Chip Component Analysis

The Silicon Motion SM2269XT is built using a 12 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. The controller is targeted at cost-optimized designs, featuring four flash channels and support for DRAM-less operation, HMB, TLC/QLC NAND, and NVMe 1.4.


The single NAND chip is a Micron 176-layer 3D TLC chip, it has a capacity of 1 TB.