Quote Originally Posted by lm358 View Post
The latest Samsung SM825 review on storagereview explains it pretty well. They call it simply "Cache Power Protection" which essentially describes the functional purpose, however I do think power-loss protection is a nicer term for it. BTW, comparing the size and number of the capacitors with that on the Intel 320 is rather telling
The Samsung uses a large DRAM cache (256 MiB), and so needs a larger total capacitance than the Intel 320 series which has only a small DRAM cache (64 MiB) and so does not need as much capacitance to power the board until the cache can be flushed to flash. Also, I suspect the Samsung's controller uses more power than the Intel 320 SSD's controller.

Note that SR uses the term "ultra capacitor" to refer to the capacitors in the SM825. That means the same thing as "super capacitor" -- they are both names for an electric double layer capacitor.

Anyway, you can bet that the 4 capacitors on the Samsung SM825 board have a lot higher total capacitance than the 6 capacitors on the Intel 320 board, and they surely cost a lot more, too.