Zotac 10 Year Anniversary Sonix 480GB PCIe Solid State Drive Overview
This drive comes in a true PCI-Express package, so it is an expansion card. Zotac has decided to give the card a nice shroud, which will make it look pretty cool inside your system. The shroud is all black and covers the length of the expansion card. On the end you have a 10 Year Anniversary logo and as you move down the card you have some ventilation holes.
Flipping over to the back we actually have a full metal back-plate on the card, that will definitely help out with cooling. In the center there is a large Zotac logo, which will light up with RGB lighting when you have your system powered on.
Taking a look at the back end of the card you can see we have some ventilation holes. This is a single-slot expansion card, and Zotac does include a low-profile bracket if you wanted to install this in say a server case.
You can remove the shroud to see what is under the hood of the drive. We did not notice any void warranty stickers anywhere. With the shroud removed we can see a large heatsink that covers the controller as well as the NAND chips on the drive. So we should not have any overheating or throttling issues with the drive.
With the heatsink removed we can see that the drive is powered by the Phison PS5007-E7, which is the same controller that powered the Patriot Hellfire drive we reviewed a few months ago. It has a PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface and 8 channels for NAND access.
Surrounding the Phison PS5007-E7 the controller are your NAND chips and cache chip. The NAND is multi-level cell (MLC) from Toshiba and the cache chip is a Nanya 512MB DDR3 chip.
