Dissection
Disclaimer: Don’t do this. It’ll cost you your warranty at best, and leave you with no warranty and a dead drive at worst.
On this side we have eight Micron flash chips, plus a 256MB Micron D9 DDR3L RAM chip and a voltage controller.
On the other side we have another eight flash chips plus a second 256MB DDR3L cache chip. 512MB of cache is pretty generous. We have the controller on this side, too. Also a space for a third DDR3 chip, maybe for ECC. That set of mSATA/mPCIe type contacts opposite the power/SATA connectors is for programming the controller in the factory, it it wired for JTAG among other things. I’m tempted to see if I can establish communications via JTAG as I have a couple different devices that speak JTAG. Don’t really want to kill this thing though.
Don’t plug it into a mPCIe/mSATA slot, odds are something would die rather abruptly.
Here’s the controller up close. Indilinx was bought by OCZ a while ago, the Vertex4 drives used a semi-in-OCZ-house Indilinx controller. This jobby is the entirely OCZ Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller. They did a hell of a job on it. It has a thermal pad connecting it to the bottom of the SSD case to get rid of what little heat it makes. At full burn in a 20c ambient I measured 32c at the hottest point of the case.
Here’s one of the flash chips. 16 Micron MT29F128G08CFAABWP-12 16GB flash chips gives us our 256GB capacity.
The Cache. As mentioned previously, these are 256MB each of 1.35v DDR3 RAM. 512MB is a fair bit of cache for a 256MB drive.
Lastly we have the voltage controller:
The flash wants 3.3v, that can be gotten from the SATA plug if the user isn’t using a Molex-SATA adapter. The cache however wants 1.35v, so this chip conjures that up. It looks like it has a second output as well, possibly 1.8v for the controller or a 3.3v source in case a Molex-SATA adapter is used.
That does it for the guts of the drive.
