The SM22080S3/120G 120GB -
M.2 SATA and PCIe drives are much thinner than regular mSATA drive are, but still manage to maintain the same performance profile. These drives are also going to be much longer in most cases, as your average mSATA drive is going to be 55mm long (although there are 78mm drives as well). As you can see in the image below M.2 drives are easy to spot in a crowd.

The Kingston drive uses a Phison PS3108-S8-I SATA to NAND Flash controller chip. This is what allows the drive to communicate between the NAND Flash Modules and the SATA interface. In a PCIe or SATA Express device a different controller would be required. The PS3108-S8 has some solid specifications and is a good choice for this drive:

Controller Highlights
  Compatible with SATA 3.0 specification
  Compatible with SATA I/II/III 1.5G/ 3G/ 6Gbps interface
  Support 2Gb/4Gb DDRIII Cache
  Built-in enhanced up to 72bit/1KB ECC circuit (BCH)
  Program RAM (Program Upgradable)
Physical Characteristics
  Fabricated in 55nm CMOS process
  Available 324-pin BGA package
  Operating Voltage: 0.9 ~ 3.6V
  Built-in Regulator that supports 3.3V/1.8V Flash I/O
NAND Flash Support
  Supports 10/20+nm flash
  Supports up to 64 chip-enable pins
  Supports interleave, 2-plane and 8-channel Flash access
  Supports SLC/MLC large block (8K/16K page) NAND Flash Memory
  MLC sequential R/W speed up to 520/460 MB/s
Other Features
  Built-in static and dynamic wear-leveling
  Power Saving implemented
  Supports model name information update

Moving on to the actual Flash modules used on the SM22080S3 we find Kingston’s very own FA32B08UCT1-BC modules. These are 32GB each with the four on the M.2 card totaling up to 128GB RAW and 120GB available.

Another interesting item on the drive is a NANYA DDRIII chip, according to the specs that we could find on it this is a 2GB module so this is most likely the cache for the drive.

All in all the SM22080S3 is looking like it could be a nice drive. Let’s run some tests and find out.