The NVMe PCIe Gen 4.0 SSDs from Neo Forza are part of the NFP400 series and you may have already seen the TechPowerUp review which did feature the NFP455 model, with the Innogrit controller. The SKU we are going to test here is the NFP425 which does feature a Phison PS5018-E18 controller but the same 3D TLC NAND Flash ICs. The new Phison controller is native PCIe 4.0 and is produced on the 12nm node (TSMC), but more importantly it does comply the latest NVMe 1.4 specifications. It comes with 3x ARM Cortex R5 + 2x Phison’s Proprietary IP CoXProcessor (for a total of 5 total cores), has an 8-channel design with 32CE, supports storage space up to 8TB, has support for up to 1600MT/s NAND bus speed, DDR4 caching technology, end-to-end Data Path Protection, SmartECC, Hardware AES, SHA, RSA 4096, TCG & Opal 2.0, Pyrite Encryption but also Crypto Erase support.
For the 1TB model we are going to review in this article, Neo Forza is estimating read speeds in sequential mode of about 7000MB/s and writes of about 5500MB/s which is huge! The Random 4K QD32 Read IOPS are estimated at about 350K, while the writes at about 700K. In terms of electrical specs, we have an average IDLE power of about 22mW and when in use the power consumption can raise to about 6.6W (in detail about 6.3W while doing sequential reads and about 6.6W while writing to the drive).
The Reliability is quite high thanks to the use of 3D TLC NAND, so for the 1TB model Neo Forza has estimated about 700TBW, with the MTBF at about 1600000 hours.
The drive has arrived in a bulk format since the packaging was not ready during the time of the review. We noted the anti-static bag not allowing the drive to move during transit but also the small sticker with the product code name and serial number:
The top area of the drive includes a large heatspreader, with a nice pattern on a black background; this is not a simple sticker but incorporates a thin copper foil in order to dissipate the heat faster:
On the back side of the PCB we do not have any extra components but another Neo Forza sticker including the product code name, capacity and serial number:
After removing the heatspreader, we will uncover four NAND ICs, a DRAM cache for storing the mapping tables but also the central Phison controller:
Each 256GB IC is a Micron 176-layer 3D TLC NAND:
The Phison PCIe 4.0 controller with eight channels is produced on TSMC’s 12nm node and supports up to 32 dies:
1GB of DDR4 cache is assured by the H5AN8G6NDJ memory IC from SKhynix:
A secondary Phison IC is also available with the PS6108-22:
The drive installation should take only a few minutes (depending on the motherboard layout):
