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The XPG Mars 980 Blade comes in a pretty compact box with a decent image of the drive on the front showing the drive and the separate heatsink. Above the image are four icons displaying: speed rating, that the drive has a DRAM cache buffer, is compatible with laptops and works with PS5. Under the image is a sticker carrying the drive's capacity.
The rear of the box has a small multilingual list of the drive's features and an icon displaying that the drive comes with a 5-year warranty.
The 2TB Mars 980 Blade is built on a single-sided format.
On one side of the PCB sits the Silicon Motion SM2508 controller, along with a 2GB LPDDR4-2666MHz DRAM IC (Samsung K4A8G16 5WC-BCTD) and two 1TB 232-layer NAND packages (Micron B58R NAND (rebranded as ADATA 600799DG). Silicon Motion's SM2508 is an 8-channel controller built on a 6nm process using a quad-core 32-bit Arm Cortex-R8 processor running at 1.25GHz in conjunction with a single 32-bit Cortex-M0. The eight NAND channels support speeds of up to 3,600 MT/s.
The XPG Mars 980 Blade comes with an optional stick-on heat spreader.
ADATA's SSD management utility goes by the name SSD ToolBox. Looking beyond the graphically rich GUI, the SSD ToolBox is a feature-rich and useful tool. There's a pretty comprehensive drive information page that includes remaining space, drive temperature and drive health. You get two diagnostic options, Quick and Full. The Quick option runs basic tests on free space of the selected drive, while the Full option runs a reading test on all used space of the selected drive.
The utilities page includes Security Erase, Firmware updates and an export log, and there is a performance benchmark. The SSD ToolBox also offers drive cloning support as well.
