Packaging

The Drive

The drive is designed for the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


PCI-Express 5.0 x4 is used as the host interface to the rest of the system, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth compared to PCIe 4.0 x4.


On the PCB you'll find the controller and two flash chips, a DRAM cache chip is included, too.


Crucial's sticker is just a plastic sticker, there is no metal core, so the thermal properties are slightly worse than a sticker with a metal core.

Chip Component Analysis

The Silicon Motion Technology SM2508 controller is the company's first PCI-Express 5.0 controller for consumer applications. It supports PCIe 5.0 x4 and runs with eight flash channels at 3600 MT/s. SMI fabricates the controller using a 6 nanometer process at TSMC Taiwan.


The two flash chips are Micron 276-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 1 TB.


The Micron DRAM cache chip has a capacity of 2 GB and runs at LPDDR4-4266.