Photos Part Two: The Vertex 4 128GB
The drive itself is nice looking:
Don’t squeeze it, don’t drop it. Probably shouldn’t throw it either.
Now this wouldn’t be a Bobnova review if the warranty sticker survived intact, so here we go! Don’t try this at home.
16 flash chips, two DDR3 chips for cache and one Indilinx controller.
The controller has a thermal pad that attaches it to the metal part of the case to use it as a heatsink:
The two DDR3 chips are these guys. 256MB per chip, rated at DDR3-1333-9-9-9. 512MB of cache!
The flash chips are Intel.
Lastly, the head honcho on the PCB, the controller chip.
There’s a small voltage controller too, likely to power the DDR3 as it wants 1.5v. Can’t get 1.5v out of a SATA power plug.
It’s about time for some real performance figures here I’d say. I’m very curious to see what the 512MB of cache does for the write speeds. The Sandforce controller’s big thing was very fast write speeds with minimal cache. It did this by keeping a flash chip as a cache and doing a lot of compression on the fly. That meant it didn’t have very good write speeds with data that was already compressed or wasn’t compressible, it also meant that you lost some capacity. This controller doesn’t have either of those issues in theory.
