The P34A60 comes in a small, blue, black and white box. In addition to a plastic window which lets you see what the drive looks like, the packaging advertises some of the drive's key features including its 1TB capacity, support for NVMe 1.3, and 5 year warranty.
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Physical Features:
The P34A60 uses the 2280 form factor for M.2 (NGFF) SSDs. It measures 22 x 80 x 3.5 mm and weighs in at 8g. The drive also has an "M key" edge connector which provides PCIe SSDs with up to 4x lanes of bandwidth.
The P34A60 uses Silicon Motion's SM2263XT controller. Designed for cost-effective, small form factor and low power client SSDs, this DRAM-less, PCIe Gen 3 x4 controller is powered by a dual ARM Cortex CPU and offers four channels with up to four chip enables (CE) per channel. The SM2263XT also supports the latest 3D NAND from all major manufacturers and features Silicon Motion’s proprietary NANDXtend error-correcting code (ECC) technology, SRAM ECC and end-to-end data path protection.
It's hard to see in these photos, but there is a small, green LED near the M.2 connector that flashes when the P34A60 is being accessed.
For the 1TB version of the P34A60, Silicon Power opted to use Micron's 64-layer TLC 3D NAND flash. Looking at the picture above, you can see that there are four 256GB NAND flash packages on the top of the PCB. Also take note that there is no DRAM cache chip. The P34A60's SM2263XT controller takes full advantage of NVMe's Host Memory Buffer feature by using a small portion of the computer's memory to cache the mapping tables.
