Photos and Breakdown
The drive is fairly basic. You have a black brushed aluminum shell on the Chronos, this is a little different than the rough black finish on the Striker. On top is a sticker with the product name and capacity. This is also where they slip on the serial number and all of the logos that you are required to have on an electronic device. They also slipped a small “assembled in the USA” logo down in the corner as well.
The drive is a thin 7mm drive that will fit in thinner devices like Ultrabooks. It hooks up with a standard SATA power and SATA cable and supports SATA 3 for the best performance.
The underside of the Chronos doesn’t have to much going on. Here we can see though that the drive has mounting holes both on the bottom and on the side of the drive. You shouldn’t run into any weird mounting issues. If your case doesn’t support 2.5 inch drives you will however have to get an adapter because they do not include one with the drive. Most modern cases should have you covered though.
Getting into the Chronos required a small Philips screwdriver. I just had to remove the four silver screws on the bottom of the drive and then the drive split in half. From there to get the PCB out I had to remove four more screws that attach it to the base on the inside.
With the PCB out we can finally get a better look at what makes the Chronos 480GB tick. For starters, this drive is surprisingly bare. On the backside of the PCB there is only the SandForce SF-2281 controller and nothing else. A lot of you might remember this controller because it has been around for around 4 years. Mushkin is using the unthrottled firmware on the controller to get the most out of it but I wouldn’t expect to see the same performance as their new Striker for example. For NAND the drive only has four Toshiba based chips giving them each a capacity of 120GB each.
