Crucial V4 256GB SATA II SSD Review

Inside the Crucial V4

Opening the drive requires the usual removal of four screws to allow removal one side of the shell.

Once inside, the PCB is not encumbered by any screws or pins, allowing it to come out easily.

The initial side of the PCB affords a view of a single line of flash and an empty row which could be used in the future for a 512GB drive.

We fully expected and did find that the MLC NAND employed is Micron fabricated with each chip being 32GB in density and 25nm in architecture. With eight total modules on board, total physical drive capacity is 256GB (1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes).

Flipping the board over we find the remaining four NAND modules, the controller and a cache chip.

Again, Micron is the manufacturer of the cache which is 166MHz DDR SDRAM at 128MB in capacity.

The Phison PS3105-S5 controller is not unique to the V4 drive as it’s been spotted in a number of other drives like the Patriot Torqx 2 although it’s use is not all that widespread. It supports the usual features such as TRIM, idle garbage collection, and wear-leveling tasks. Unlike SandForce controllers, it does not use compression as a method for increasing performance and relies on the a cache to buffer data and mitigate hiccups in performance.