The FALCON comes in a small black box. Along with a picture of the drive, the front advertises a number of its key features including its 1TB capacity, PCIe Gen3x4 interface and 3D NAND. The back of the box provides a bit more information regarding the FALCON's features and performance.
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Physical Features:
The FALCON uses the 2280 form factor for M.2 (NGFF) SSDs. It measures 22 x 80 x 2.9 mm and tips the scales at a mere 9g. The drive also has an "M key" edge connector which provides PCIe SSDs with up to 4x lanes of bandwidth.
The FALCON uses Realtek's RTS5762DL controller. This DRAM-less, PCIe Gen 3 x4 controller supports eight channels with up to four chip enables (CE) per channel. The RTS5762DL is also compatible with 3D TLC/QLC NAND flash and offers features like AES 256-bit encryption, advanced low-density parity check (LDPC) technology and end-to-end data path protection.
For the 1TB version of the FALCON, ADATA has opted to use their own 3D TLC NAND flash. If you'd remove the heatsink, you'd see that there are four 256GB NAND flash packages on top of the PCB. There is also no DRAM cache chip as the FALCON's RTS5763DL controller takes full advantage of NVMe's Host Memory Buffer feature by using a small portion of the computer's memory to cache the mapping tables.
