Hot or Not? New Samsung and Solidata SSDs

Inside the Solidata SSDs

So, what is the reason for the high power consumption of the two Solidata drives? If you look into the device manager, the Solidata SSDs appear as a “JMicron HW RAID” device, which means that they are based on RAID technology internally. Looking at the photo to the left, you can see that there are actually two circuit boards inside the Solidata SSDs; they both look alike.

Solidata utilizes a JMicron JMF602 flash-to-SATA/USB 2.0 controller, which is not known to be particularly power efficient. However, it is flexible, as it supports USB 2.0 if the manufacturer wants to build a drive that supports both interfaces.

The JMicron controller does not support cache memory like the configurations we’ve seen from Intel and Samsung, but it does support eight banks of flash memory. Still, the result isn’t at all competitive.