Peeking Under The WD Blue SSHD PCB

What’s Under The PCB

Western Digital has a penchant for keeping all surface-mounted components on the reverse side of the PCB – to prevent static damage and to allow for better cooling. It’s protected by a thin foam cutout on the chassis side, with a thermal pad to help transfer heat from the HDD controller to the hard disk drive chassis.

The 1 TB WD Blue (WD10J31X) SSHD used the Marvell 88i9441 Soleil-H SSHD controller. It comes with two 600 MHz ARM Cortex-R4 processors and supports hardware 256-bit AES encryption, Native Command Queueing and a 6 Gb/s SATA interface.

To manage the integrated 8 GB flash memory, Western Digital used the JMicron JMF608 NAND flash controller. It supports up to 4 read/write channels at up to 300 Mbits/s (read) and 200 Mbits/s (write) per channel. That works out to a maximum throughput of 150 MB/s (read) and 100 MB/s (write).

The primary cache remains the 64 MB Winbond W9751G6KB-25 DDR2 SDRAM chip – the same memory chip used by the 6 TB Western Digital Red drive. This is is a newer version of the memory chip used in the 4 TB Western Digital RE (WD4000FYYZ), with an operating speed of 800 MHz, 4 memory banks and faster timings of 5-5-5. This gives it a peak transfer rate of 200 MB/s.

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To tie the SSD and HDD components together, Western Digital used the Marvell 88SE9171 PCI Express 2.0 x1 to SATA 6Gb/s switch. This is a 2-port SATA switch.

Unlike the 4 TB WD Blue SSHD (read our review here) which used the ST Microelectronics WDHC8TD motor drive controller, the 1 TB WD Blue SSHD used used a proprietary WD Nautilus motor drive controller.

All of the 1 TB WD Blue SSHD‘s firmware was stored in a 4 Mbit (512 KB) Winbond 25X40CLVIG serial flash memory chip.

Finally, the 1 TB WD Blue SSHD features a single shock sensor, just like the 4 TB Western Digital Blue SSHD (read our review here). The shock sensor allows the drive to detect shock events and automatically park the drive heads to avoid damage.

Next Page > Testing The WD Blue SSHD, Usable Capacity, Temperature

 

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