Photos and Breakdown

The SU800 isn’t a looker or anything, ADATA didn’t go with a machined aluminum case or anything else to stand out. This drive is a basic black drive with a casing that is half sheet metal and half plastic. It weighs almost nothing because of the plastic and the half sized PCB inside. The top of the drive has a branding sticker across it with the ADATA logo and bird along the Ultimate SU800 branding. The metallic blue finish on the top does look good, though. The sticker on the bottom has the normal certification logos and then has barcodes and serial numbers for the warranty, model number, and WWN.

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The drive is 7mm thick when used without the included adapter so it should work in any device with support for 2.5-inch drives.

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With the half plastic half metal casing, getting into the SU800 was a little different than normal. I had to pull out the one screw locking everything together on the top under the top sticker and then start working my way around the case to pop the latches off. I nearly tore the casing up a few times, not to mention that hole in the top of the sticker lol. Normally you can pull an SSD apart and at least make it presentable after with just the warranty stickers being removed. But if you get into the SU800, don’t expect it to look perfect after.

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The half-length PCB inside is held in place with the same screw that held the top of the casing on in the middle so this really is a one screw SSD.

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Here is a look at the metal base. The paint job on the inside isn’t very good, not that it should ever matter.

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Being the 256GB model our SU800 wasn’t really packed. In fact, even just on this side of the PCB we only have one NAND chip with three open spots for the larger capacity drives. Both sides considered the PCB has three NAND on it with a total of 8 spots. There is also a second spot for an additional cache. The square chip up close to the SATA connection is the Silicon Motion SM2258 controller. This is a four channel controller so keep in mind that in order to get the full performance you need to get this 256GB model or larger, the 128GB model can’t take full advantage of the controller's channels. Just to the right of the controller is a single NANYA 128MB RAM chip for the onboard cache. For NAND, and what makes this SSD special, they went with Micron 3D TLC NAND. This means the memory cells are stacked. In this case, they are using 32 layer 384 Gb density NAND in three 96GB packages. This means the SU800 has a total of 288 gigs of actual storage capacity with the extra 32 gigs of capacity reserved to replace any that goes bad in the lifetime of the drive.

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