Zotac Premium Edition Solid State Drive Review
Taking a first look at the drive it has a very subtle look with an all black casing and a simple Zotac logo at the center. Many people actually prefer a clean look like this compared to some of the flashy SSD designs that we’ve seen lately.
Flipping the drive over there is a sticker on the back that lets us know the model number and capacity. There are also four mounting holes on the bottom of the drive.
At the end of the drive you of course have your SATA power and data connections.
The drive is a 7mm drive so you should have no problem getting it to fit in smaller devices. On each side of the drive you will find two mounting holes.
Zotac has gone with a screwless casing design, which makes it quite easy to get inside. Keep in mind if you are going to open the drive you will void your warranty. Using a flat-head screwdriver you should be able to pop the casing apart. Inside you will find a full-size PCB face down. On the back of the PCB there are four NAND chips. They are labeled as DP58G5LAPA, which is Toshiba A19 MLC NAND.
Removing four screws we can take the PCB out. On the other side there are four more NAND chips, giving us a total of 8. So each NAND chip is 32 GB. The drive is powered by the Phison PS3110-S10 controller. This is a true quad-core controller, with three of its cores exclusively being used for flash management tasks like background garbage collection. There is also end to end data protection between the controller, DRAM cache, and NAND chips. New Smart ECC technology which is new RAID ECC technology to recover uncorrectable errors. When a page is found faulty and flash ECC protection fails to recover the uncorrectable errors, the defective page will be reconstructed by the Smart ECC engine. Finally there is a small Nanya cache chip.
