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Electronics => Beginners => Topic started by: Inume on October 30, 2021, 05:24:09 pm

Title: Is there some way to differentiate between NAND and other flash types on a PCB?
Post by: Inume on October 30, 2021, 05:24:09 pm

Modern devices (smartphone, notebooks) often use some kind of flash for data storage. Depending on the vendor this can be emmc, ufs, nvme and maybe even plain old NAND.
The problem is you can't really find out what is used because you can't find any information on the chip and the information you can find online for the same device differs sometimes because most people don't care as long as it fast.

Given some device like:
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Apple+TV+4K+2021+Teardown/142845 (https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Apple+TV+4K+2021+Teardown/142845)
or
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/06/m1-mac-ram-and-ssd-upgrades-possible/ (https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/06/m1-mac-ram-and-ssd-upgrades-possible/)
is there some way you can be sure?
Pinout of the chip or the pcb side? The chips on the M1 seem to have different pinouts though ...
PCB layout? Voltages on some connected test points?
When the chip can be replaced with some chip with more storage does this mean it is not NAND (like in the macrumors link)? iirc NAND has to be handled by the firmware so a larger size might require changes but I'm not sure about that.
Is bare NAND even still used nowadays in modern smart devices?
For older iphones it seemed to be NVME: http://ramtin-amin.fr/#nvmepcie (http://ramtin-amin.fr/#nvmepcie)