Kingston SSDNow V100 128GB SSD Review

Kingston SSDNow V100 128GB – Internals

Opening up the case of the Kingston V100 to access the guts is a mere matter of removing four Allen hex head screws once the pesky warranty sticker is summarily dispatched. Resting against the controller is a bubble gun pink thermal pad that helps dissipate heat and reduce physical shock.

On one side of the PCB board we find eight of the sixteen NAND flash chips along with a small cache chip near the corner.

A closer look at the 64MB of SDRAM cache, which sits at a 45 degree angle on the board, reveals it is manufactured by Mira. The cache helps buffer data to prevent the drive stuttering that plagued many of the early consumer drives. As a point of reference, the faster V+ 100 drives actually carry a 128MB controller.

The NAND flash is of the MLC 32nm variety and Toshiba in manufacture. Each chip is 8GB in density for a total of 128GB on board.

The flip side yields a similar view except rather than a cache chip, we find the drive controller perched at a 45 degree angle to the PCB, located in the center nearest to the SATA 3Gbps interface.

Thanks to the thermal pad, the etching is a bit tough to make out. The part number on the chip itself is actually TC58NCF618GBT and also carries the Toshiba brand. The ‘618’ in the part number references the fact that this is the JMF618 controller we have seen before which is essentially a JMicron JMF612 controller carrying the Toshiba brand. We’ve seen this before on other V Series drives and it does support TRIM and somewhat aggressive idle garbage collection.