Patriot Zephyr 128GB JMicron Solid-State Drive Review

Inside The Zephyr SSD – JMicron

This is the part of the review where we impart to you the sage advice of not opening the case of your SSD. Doing so, as the stickers on the Zephyr so elegantly dictate, will void your warranty and ruin any hope you may have of RMA’ing if something goes wrong.

For your viewing pleasure and to satisfy our destructive urges, we cracked the Zephyr open to see what goodies lay in wait for our discovery. Alas, no surprises to be found, although that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Two rows of four Intel MLC NAND chips line the back side of the PCB which is covered by a few quality control stickers. No surprises here.

On the other side we see eight more of the Intel NAND chips as well as the cache and controller. The PCB itself is generic in that there is no Patriot branding to be found.

It’s easy to tell that this is a JMicron JMF612 controller which differs slightly from the 618 controller in that the 612 supports Samsung NAND and the 618 supports Toshiba NAND. It also looks like the JMF612 works nicely with Intel MLC NAND as it is being used here.

The cache consists of 64MB of Samsung DRAM cache to buffer the data and prevent stuttering under heavy I/O.