G. Skill Titan 256GB SSD Review

Internal Impressions

Please remember that opening an SSD will effectively void your warranty.


To open the Titan all you have to do is remove four screws and gently pry the top lid off. Unlike the Patriot Warp v2 we recently reviewed this drive does not have any warranty void stickers in place BUT just because there are none, it doesn’t mean cracking open your shiny new Titan WON’T void your warranty. If you do open it up just assume you have nullified your warranty and pretend the stickers are of the invisible, printed on unobtanium variety.


The board layout is at first blush very similar to the Warp v2. At one end you have your SATA power and data connectors, with the I/O controller chips offset and then two rows of four NAND MLC flash chips. Meanwhile, the other side of this PCB has another 8 chips soldered to it (also in two rows of 4) making it for a grand total 16 NAND flash chips. However, unlike the v2 this G.Skill unit has not one but two I/O controller chips and a very small RAID controller chip located between the data / power ports and the two I/O controllers.


The I/O controller chips shown above are, as expected, JMicron model 602s. This is the same chip found in many SSDs out there but since this drive is internally set up as two SSDs on the one PCB there has to be two of them. Through the miracle of miniaturization the Titan really is two 128GB drives melded onto the one PCB and all crammed inside a standard 2.5” laptop form factor. That is one impressive feat!


The magic chip which allows this melding of two SSDs into one is the RAID controller chip shown above. This chip is also by JMicron; to be specific it is the JMB390 controller chip. This controller is a one-lane PCI Express to one-port Serial ATA II Host Controller which supports SATA II Gen2i and Gen2m, as well as Native Command Queuing (NCQ) and Hot Plugging. All in all it is a small, low power RAID controller which should make good fit for devices such as SSDs, assuming it is powerful enough that is. It is a shame that this controller does not seem to support external cache (or at least doesn’t have any in this setup). If it did then it really would have the potential of being the perfect mini hardware RAID controller for SSDs.


The NAND chips used in the Titan are Samsung K9MDG08U5M-PCB0. Once again we, using the online Samsung model decoder we can see these chips are 48 pin MLC DSP, 1st gen lead free (ROHS compliant), 2.7V ~ 3.6V, 50 nanosecod NAND chips which operate with Quad nCE (Quad Chip Enable control) & Quad R/nB (Quad Ready/Busy Output). This model is rated at a density of 128Gbits or 16GB per chip. Above the model number (and as stated earlier) we can see these were made in the 46th week of 2008 and below it we can see the batch number “FCIA87X2” (or at least what we assume is the batch number but is describe by Samsung vaguely as “Customer List Reference” only).

This certainly is an intriguing setup with top notch quality components. We are still not totally sold on the whole dual 602 controller setup, but it certainly is an interesting approach to the stutter problem. How effective will it be? Only time and testing will tell. Whether or not it is effective, we do have to wonder how much added thermal output this setup will create. After all, there are now 3 controller chips all creating heat compared to the more normal one. Let’s first look at whether or not it can walk the walk and not just talk the talk, then we will look at how hot it gets while doing it.