F120 Overview
The F120 looks basically identical to the F100 we reviewed not that long ago. The only real difference is the sticker on the front. The sticker tells you that the drive is the F120, the capacity, and the part number. The drive casing is made of aluminum, which should help with cooling a little bit.
Flipping the drive over it is pretty much plain. You will notice 2 void if removed stickers. Don’t worry we will be removing them to get inside the drive in just a bit! Just like all solid state drives we have reviewed the F120 has the typical SATA power and data connections.
Getting the F120 open is quite easy, just remove the 4 small screws on the back and slide the back cover off. Obviously this does void your warranty. The F120 is basically like all of the other SandForce-based drives we have reviewed. At the center of the PCB you have the SandForce SF-1200 (SF-1222TA3-SBH to be exact) solid state drive controller. We are not sure how much cache the SandForce controller has because the cache is on the chip itself which makes it more efficient.
Around the controller you have 8 8GB Intel-branded flash chips, more specifically Intel 29F64G08CAMD8 chips. If you remove 4 more screws you can take the entire PCB out and you will find 8 more 8GB flash chips giving you 16 totaling 128GB. That means you have 8GB left over for over provisioning.
