Samsung 850 Pro 1TB SSD Review
A Closer Look at the Samsung 850 Pro:
No further screws hold the PCB in place and the board itself is smaller than the usual.
One the first side we only see just four NAND modules which seems to be too few for a drive of this capacity. Each has part number K9USGY8S7M.
Because of the new 32-layer 3D V-NAND cell structure, the chips are higher in density and therefore less are required. In this case, each are a wh0pping 128GB in capacity so just eight of them make up the whole 1025GB (1TB) capacity.
Flipping the board over, we find the remaining NAND along with the controller and the cache chip.
The LPDDR2 cache chip on this 1TB drive (K4P8G304EQ) is 1GB in capacity. The smaller drives have smaller cache capacities with the 128GB drive having 256MB and the 256GB and 512GB drives having 512MB.
The controller is the very same we saw with the Samsung EVO drive, albeit with updated firmware. The ‘MEX’ S4LN045X01-8030 controller is a triple-core ARM Cortex R4 design although we aren’t sure if Samsung boosted the clock higher than 400MHz this time around. As usual, it supports TRIM and idle garbage collection and also offers an AES 256-bit hardware-based encryption as well as support for TCG/Opal V2.0, Encrypted Drive (IEEE1667). The PSID (physical security ID) is printed on the drive label in the event the password is forgotten so it can be made useable again. Being hardware based, the encryption doesnt inhibit performance. The controller also has Dynamic Thermal Guard which prevents data loss due to overheating.