Introduction, Specifications and Packaging

A look at another fast controller in a nice package

Introduction:

You might have never heard of Angelbird – until now, that is. Angelbird Technologies GmbH is an SSD maker based out of Vorarlberg, Austria. Their product lines have historically focused around high end and Mac-based products, with a recent arch into portable SSDs (like their SSD2go line). Angelbird is known for their high build quality, and their products are assembled using a technique I can appreciate – vapor phase soldering – (seen here) a technique that puts the least possible thermal stress on the components, as well as ensuring all solder joints are oxygen free. While the vast majority of the their prior products have been build around SandForce controllers, today they have launched a new line, the SSD wrk:

The Angelbird SSD wrk is built around a new (to them) controller, the SM2246EN from Silicon Motion:

Silicon Motion prides themselves on making SSD controllers that deliver good performance at very low power consumption. For those wanting more detail on this particular controller technology, we have a detailed analysis from last August, available at this page.

Continue reading as we evaluate the new Angelbird SSD wrk!

Specifications:

The SSD wrk spec sheet lists 'up to' 563MB/s reads and 'up to' 450MB/s writes. 4k random write IOPS at 72k. Those specs are for the 512GB capacity model. Power consumption, baselined off of the 128GB model, is 0.25W idle / 1.97W max. Max consumption scales to 2.98W for the 512GB model. While Angelbird's spec sheet is a bit vague on per-capacity specs, they were kind enough to provide these values for us to reference:

128GB: 149MB/s write – 561MB/s read – IOPS 67300
256GB: 297MB/s write – 563MB/s read – IOPS 72000
512GB: 445MB/s write – 563MB/s read – IOPS 70500
All models use custom packaged Micron 20nm synchronous NAND

While the read and IOPS performance is fairly consistent across the board, we do note a sharp falloff in write speeds at capacities below 512GB.

Packaging:

The SSD wrk comes in simple packaging. Bracket is not included (but not needed in most modern systems anyway).

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