HP EX900 M.2 500GB SSD

Peal of that sticker, and behold a very nice dark looking M2 unit. Here we can see the PCB a little better and see the HP branded SM controller. With these you get the full TRIM support and garbage collection under Windows 7/8/10 or deleting files off, will result in LBAs being TRIMed. If you look all the way upwards you can see a LED array, this reacts to writes and reads, in idle the LEDs fades in and out.  We do not spot any extra data-protection here in case of a power failure.

BW29F1T08EMHAF — Look and thy shall find nothing, the NAND has been rebranded as well. This, however, is Micron NAND, TLC Toggle mode written Stacked Vertical NAND. You will find only four of these at the front-side holding 128GB per NAND chip. Yeah, that’s stacked 64-layer NAND for you matey, otherwise, you just cannot get so much storage volume in there.

So as stated, no DRAM cache chips. Remember, if you opt this SSD, you will need Windows 10 Fall Creators Update to benefit from the Host Memory Buffer technology, your system memory substitutes the memory of the drive to cache the map table. A 500 GB SSD would utilize 500 MB of your system memory and if a 1 TB SSD would be available, you’d be looking at 1GB of Host Memory Buffer (which also is the maximum the controller can utilize).

And down below as close as possible to the interface the controller, the HP PCIe-to NAND controller (HP 8068) to manage a full PCIe Gen 3(8Gb/s) x 4 bandwidth with the host while managing multiple NAND flash memory devices on 8 channels. The controller basically is a rebranded 4-channel Silicon Motion SM2263XT, a DRAM-less drive.