Angelbird SSD wrk 512GB Full Review – Silicon Motion all dressed up

Internals, Testing Methodology and System Setup

Internals:

Disassembly:

Interesting and unique layout. The SSD wrk comes apart like an old iPod Nano. The housing is seamless extruded aluminum. Fully apart:

A closer look at that small PCB:

Given this is a 512GB SSD, the flash math works out to 8 total (custom) packages, with 4 128Gbit dies each. Smaller capacities are similar in appearance, but with reduced dies per package (which also results in a write performance penalty, as noted on page 1 of this review).

Testing Methodology

Our tests are a mix of synthetic and real-world benchmarks. PCMark, IOMeter, HDTach, HDTune, Yapt and our custom File Copy test round out the selection to cover just about all bases. If you have any questions about our tests just drop into the Storage Forum and we'll help you out! 

Test System Setup

We currently employ a pair of testbeds. A newer ASUS P8Z77-V Pro/Thunderbolt and an ASUS Z87-PRO. Variance between both boards has been deemed negligible.

PC Perspective would like to thank ASUS, Corsair, and Kingston for supplying some of the components of our test rigs.