The second SKU we are going to test from the NFP400 series is the NFP425 2TB which does feature the same Phison PS5018-E18 controller and 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 2TB model, Neo Forza is estimating read speeds in sequential mode of about 7000MB/s and writes of about 6850MB/s, the highest speeds we have seen so far! The Random 4K QD32 Read IOPS are estimated at about 650K, 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 8.2W (in detail about 7.3W while doing sequential reads and about 8.2W while writing to the drive).
The Reliability is quite high thanks to the use of 3D TLC NAND, so for the 2TB model Neo Forza has estimated about 1400TBW, with the MTBF at about 1600000 hours.
As the 1TB version, the 2TB NFP425 SSD has arrived in bulk format, but carefully packaged inside an anti-static bag; the small sticker shows the product internal code name but also the serial number:
On a first look, the drive looks exactly like its 1TB version, with a large copper heatspreader on top, which helps with keeping the controller temps at bay. The heatsink also comes with a cool pattern and the Neo Forza logo on a black background:
The internal copper layer can be clearly seen when looking from the side:
On the back side, the story changes since the PCB is fully populated with additional components:
After removing the copper heatspreader from the top PCB layer, we did note four 3D TLC NAND Flash ICs, a DRAM cache for storing the mapping tables but also the central controller:
Each 256GB IC is a Micron 176-layer 3D TLC NAND:
