Samsung 470 Series 256GB SSD Review

Samsung 470 Series Internals

The first thing we noticed was the size of the PCB as compared to the drive casing. We’re accustomed to seeing the PCB fill the entire area of the case but not so with the Samsung 470 Series.

At just 3″ long and 1.8″ wide, there’s precious little real estate left on the PCB after all of the chips are in place and it’s possible that this same board could be used in a 1.8″ form factor drive.

One side features nine of the sixteen MLC NAND chips on board which are clearly Samsung’s own manufacture as evidenced by the branding. Also on this side is one of two (yes two!) K4T1G164QE-HCE6 64MB DDR2-667 cache chips for a total of 128MB of cache on board. That should be more than ample for buffering data and is rather unusual to see two cache chips.

A closer look shows the part number of the NAND as K9HDGD8U5M-HCK0 which is of the 32nm Toggle DDR 1.0 variety- each at 16GB. Those not familiar with ToggleDDR NAND, should head over to Samsung’s semiconductor site where they do a lot better job at explaining it than I’ll be able to do here.

Only the other side of the board lies the other seven NAND chips along with the second cache and the Samsung controller which supports both TRIM and garbage collection. We were unable to locate the part number S3C29MAX01-Y340 for the controller on their site but it appears to be a 32-bit ARM9 processor which is confirmed by the ARM etched right on there.

These components and versions may or may not be what the final production drive ships with but we’d be surprised to see any major differences other than maybe some revision differences in the part numbers.