Making SSDs, the TweakTown video: See how A-DATA makes SSDs based on SandForce SF-1222

TweakTown’s crew visited A-DATA’s manufacturing floor during Computex in Taiwan and shot video of A-Data’s entire manufacturing and test process. If you haven’t seen how SSDs are manufactured, this video will give you a pretty good idea of how it’s done, what kind of machines you use, and how much manual labor a vendor like A-DATA puts into its SSDs. If you are already familiar with the SSD manufacturing process, I’d still wager that you’ll pick up a tip or three looking at this 13-minute video. (Just ignore the fact that Chris the narrator misidentifies a solder-screening machine as a component-designator silkscreener. This video is quite informative to the careful observer nevertheless.)



Note: TweakTown has subsequently made this YouTube video private, so it's no longer viewable. We're leaving the link up in case they change their mind.
For one thing, this video shows that you really don’t need much machinery or complex machinery to manufacture an SSD. Unlike the close physical manufacturing tolerances needed to machine precise mechanical parts for HDDs and the clean-room measures you need to take to keep debris off of hard-disk platters during HDA assembly, SSD manufacturing floors are stereotypical of any surface-mount electronic manufacturing line and use the same SMT machines you’d find anywhere to make pretty much anything electronic. Testing and burn-in equipment appear stereotypical for electronics manufacturing as well, based on rows of naked PC motherboards offering open SATA ports just waiting to be plugged with SSDs for testing. A-DATA’s SMT line looks like a relatively low-volume manufacturing line, considering the number of hand operations shown in the video.

Another interesting segment of this video is a walk through the area running SandForce’s test software. The editing crew had to fuzz out the screen images to protect SandForce’s proprietary test software. A-DATA’s S559 SSD incorporates SandForce’s SF-1222 NAND Flash controller. You won’t learn much about those SandForce test tools, other than the observation that they are being kept secure from prying eyes.

You can see the full TweakTown writeup at http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/3342/how_to_make_an_ssd_touring_a_data_s_taipei_factory/index.html