[howto] identify this NAND flash chip?
August 2, 2022 10:22 AM   Subscribe

i am trying to ID this NAND Flash chip on an NVMe M.2 SSD. there is no mfg logo. merely searching for the numbers hasn't given me anything useful. what is this chip, but even better, how can i learn how to id these types of things in the future?

this is a PNY CS1030 1T drive. obviously it has a Phison controller, but i'm trying to determine whether the NAND is QLC or TLC. I can't find anywhere PNY states whether it's TLC or QLC. In their review, ServeTheHome seems to think it's TLC for some reason but others observe their specimen is QLC (comments of this review).

The specimen in the STH review is said to be using NAND from "Yangtze Memory Technologies Co" but it is well-known that SSD manufacturers may change up components without disclosure.

Like one of the commenters on the STH review, i partially peeled of the label to see what the NAND looked like, and I cannot identify the chip from doing web searches on the inscription. Google Lens has the label as follows:
CA78684A0A
02127N
3735313
I think it's safe to assume the NAND is QLC because the drive is cheap as hell and PNY would want to broadcast it as being TLC if, in fact, it were.

My deeper question is how to learn to ID chips like this in the future when there is no obvious manufacturer's label and searching gives no result. Engineers must have some method to track this sort of thing down, yes? I tried looking up how to do this myself but I didn't find a clear way to do so.

note: brainfog may be impacting my ability to figure this out.
posted by glonous keming to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)
 
I'm no expert but you've got me curious. What was on the label you peeled back, did that show a manufacturer?
posted by Lady Li at 11:26 AM on August 2, 2022


Ok: Having worked in the industry I doubt this information would be widely available unless the chips were being sold for consumer/hobbyist use. It's probable the only people who need to identify a chip from its appearance are the people who are installing it. So if I were looking for this information for work purposes, I would contact the manufacturer or possibly contact several manufacturers looking for their catalog information. It's possible some of the people who are reporting this info off the top of their heads have that experience already.

More likely, they have a way of telling from the computer/software side. You might be able to tell the difference using either performance tests or parameters that the computer can detect. But I'm not sure how the different types of chips would show up or where you'd have to go in your computer configuration info to get deeper than the top level, so I can't help you beyond pointing in that direction.

Also, it doesn't make search results better but just because it's bugging me, Google lens got the printed information wrong, it's CA7BG, not CA786.
posted by Lady Li at 11:50 AM on August 2, 2022 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: Oh yeah, I know what the drive "is." It's a PNY CS1030, bought brand new from Dell (using reward points) so no chance of Amazon counterfeiting. Came in a sealed retail package. Nothing untoward or suspicious about it as base standard. It just seems like it's a pretty dodgy piece of kit, inherently. AFAIK PNY doesn't manufacture SSDs. Like so many others in the SSD game these days, they just slap their badge and maybe firmware onto the drive.

Dell reward points expire fairly quickly so I just got this in a use-em-or-lose-em scenario, figuring I'd find something to do with it.

[typed this before seeing Lady Li's 2nd comment]
posted by glonous keming at 11:52 AM on August 2, 2022


There are giant code books from different manufacturers. You can sometimes find some older volumes out in the wild in PDF format. There's a common one for SMD components that is super easy to google, but it has components only, not ICs.

The trouble is that the thing you're trying to do is kind of the reverse of the usual case; the usual thing is to get the big list of NANDs from a manufacturer and pick the one that's right for the job. The use case for tracking a part backwards from after market by it's serial numbers is not very economically supported.

You'd probably find it easier to get a big list of all the NANDs from somewhere like octopart and searching through them. Even then, they may just not be on the market with that number if they're manufactured in-house or by a sister company. (Or by ghost shift or whatever.)
posted by Horkus at 11:55 AM on August 2, 2022


Googling shows that there are ways to get the manufacturer ID from the firmware, and often, the ID of the controller, but there doesn't seem to be a universal way to pull the actual flash mem chip's ID.

ChipGenius may do it, but it's written in China and not well documented for Western users.
posted by kschang at 11:58 AM on August 2, 2022


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