THE ARC 100 480GB

Size-wise the ARC 100 is just like any other 2.5" 7mm thick SSD so nothing really new to see here aside the nice sticker at the top.

On a large sticker placed at the bottom you will find the FW version, part number, serial number, barcodes, the electrical requirements of the drive and several certification and warning icons.

At the rear of the drive we see the usual SATA power and data connectors.

Opening the drive is not hard just remove the 4 Philips screws placed beneath the top sticker.

On one side of the PCB we see 8 NAND flash modules by Toshiba (the new A19nm ones) and a single Micron DRAM cache chip (512MB DDR3-1600).

8 more NAND flash modules by Toshiba are placed on the opposite side of the PCB along with yet another Micron DRAM cache chip (the 480GB model has a total of 1GB DDR3-1600 cache).

The Barefoot 3 M10 controller is placed at the center of the PCB and makes use of a thermal pad to transfer heat onto the aluminum enclosure.