Photos and Breakdown

So like the HyperX predator that I covered a while back, the OCZ RD400 is an M.2 SSD, but it comes with a PCIe adapter. M.2 has a good saturation rate with mid to high-end motherboards with both of Intel's most recent chipset launches (X99 and Z170) but there are still a lot of people who are going to need an adapter. The PCIe adapter is shockingly simple with just a few things leading from the M.2 connection. Everything past the R on the drive on over is just black PCB. OCZ did slip in their stripes over on the right side of the PCB. The Drive is a 2280 M.2 drive but the adapter does have support for a longer drive as well. The back of the adapter Is even simpler and from the back, we can also see that there is a hole for a smaller drive length as well giving Toshiba flexibility for the future.

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With the single screw removed the drive comes right off if you need to transfer the drive to an M.2 slot on your motherboard. Behind the drive, there is one thermal pad I would normally assume this is to transfer heat off the SSD but there isn’t anything that is going to generate heat on the back of this drive. It is more likely just for padding.

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The RD400 itself has a sticker on it covering most everything on the visible side. The sticker has the Toshiba branding down in the corner but they feature the OCZ branding in the middle. The R over on the left is the Revo branding as well from the RD name. On the right is a condensed version of the barcode and all of the normally required information for an SSD. All of this same information is also on the back of the drive, but because it ships on the adapter card it needs to be visible here as well. I was surprised that the actual drive capacity isn’t really visible here, you have to look extremely close down to the tiny part number to actually see the capacity.

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Like I said, when we get the drive out and flip it around there is a sticker on the back with the same information that was on the front in the white area only this has a little more room to be larger. The most interesting thing is the PCB isn’t used at all on this side.

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With the sticker off we can better see what is going on with the RD400. The drive uses both Toshiba branded 15nm MLC NAND and a Toshiba branded controller. The controller has the part number TC58NCP070GSB on it. It is a 4 channel PCIe-based NVMe chip, I can’t tell if it is an in-house design, in the past OCZ has used rebranded controllers from time to time. To the right of the controller are the two 256GB MLC NAND chips and to the left is a Samsung LPDDR3 Dram chip for the buffer. The RD400 has the same hardware design as the Toshiba XG3 M.2 SSD. The RD400 does have a different firmware, a custom driver, and OCZs SSD management tool to set it apart.

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garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #38158 31 Aug 2016 20:54
Who else is ready to start moving to PCIe based NVMe drives? I know I am, look at those numbers!

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