G.Skill 64GB SATA II SSD Review

As mentioned earlier, to open this little fella you have to peel off the “warranty void” sticker and reveal the fourth hidden screw. These screws are tiny and you really need a good jewelers screwdriver to open it up. When you have those screws removed you then simply leaver the top off and look inside at the elegant simplistic beauty which lies therein. Now unlike normal hard drive popping the top off an looking inside will not ruin your hard drive. You don’t need a clean room like you do a normal drive, heck all you need is an insatiable curiosity which will allow you to justify voiding your warranty on your shiny new eight hundred dollar piece of computer kit.


When you take a good close look at the PCB board you realize how simple a setup these drives really are. The PCB is a single sided affair which has a grand total of ten chips on it. Eight of these chips are the NAND flash chips (we will get into greater depth about these chips later) which actually make up the storage or “hard drive” of this Solid State Drive. The other two chips are a ARM processor chip and a small ram chip.


The actual storage of this drive is eight, 8GB NAND SLC flash memory chips. In this particular instance they are Samsung K9NCG08U5M chips. These chips are lead free, large block Single Layer Chips as opposed to the slower (but cheaper) Multi-Layer Chips. The beauty of SLC chips is they hold only 1 bit of data per cell as opposed to 2 bits per cell in MLC. On the surface, one would think 2 bits are better than 1 and thus MLC would “logically” be faster; however you would be wrong. Because they only store 1 bit of data per cell, the cell only needs two states (0 and 1, or off and on, etc) whereas MLC needs 4 states to store its 2 bits. This means the MLC cells react slower and thus have slower reads and especially writes.

An easy way to think about this is two look at Parallel ATA vs. Serial ATA, the more complex 80 pin scheme maybe more complex than SATA, but this dead simply serial interface can transmit a lot more data in a shorter period of time; and the same holds true for NAND flash memory. When you get down to “the brass tacks” as they say, people do not care how something does it, just how fast it can do it.

While speed is the biggest reason Samsung (and thus G.Skill) chose SL chips we also have to remember that they are more durable as well. Samsung states the MTBF as 2 million hours and the rule of thumb is each cell should be good for more than a 100,000 write cycles (with advanced algorithm wear leveling keeping all cells at about the same state); not only are these chips fast and durable they also have a lot of error correction built into them. Most SL chips have 1 or 2 bits for error correction, whereas according to Samsung’s part number decoder) these particular ones have 4 bit ECC for read and 4 for write (the “5” in the serial number). This is the same amount as the overly complex ML chips have and this is a down right amazing amount of overkill; and we think we speak for everyone when we say Bloody good job Samsung and G.Skill.


The I/O controller chip shown above is a Samsung System On a Chip (SoC) ARM processor model S3C49RBX01-YH80. While not much is known about this chip, we can easily decode the model number into its pertinent parts using Samsungs SoC Model decoder. The first two digits tell us it is indeed a microcontroller, the fourth and 5th digit tells us it’s a “special” 32bit controller; and the 6th states it’s a 8MB ROM Master. What is very interesting is the “01” at the end (before the dash) tells us this 32bit special microcontroller 8MB Rom Master, is a first generation chip. After the dash just tells us it’s a package type and pin outs (FPGA 285 pin, lead free tray package w/ 0 ROM).

Needless to say this 32bit controller is also an ARM SoC as it is stamped so right on the chip and as such is a low heat device which is more than powerful enough to handle the data loads any SATA 2 bus can throw at it.


As with most controller chips, this one requires its own Random Access Memory, and in this instance Samsung went for one of their own chips. The K4M56323PI-HG75 is a 133mhz, cas latency 3, 256mb chip (8Mx32). I’m sure your all going “well that’s interesting…but what does it do?” and the easy answer is this chip does the same job as the cache on a platter based hard drive. Yes, this SSD has the equivalent of 256mb of ultra fast cache on board, though this is an oversimplification of the matter as the main NAND chips are 50ns, so they are not exactly slow either.