OCZ ARC 100 240GB Solid State Drive Review

OCZ ARC 100 Overview
Taking a first look at the OCZ ARC 100 the sticker on the top of the drive really catches your attention. It is bright blue and has the OCZ Storage Solutions logo on it and a smaller ARC 100 logo in the bottom left corner.

OCZ ARC 100

Flipping the drive over there is a sticker with all of your important information on it like your model number and serial numbers. There are also the typical 4 bottom mounting points on each corner of the drive.

OCZ ARC 100

The drive itself is very thin at only 7 mm-thick. This means you can fit this in newer notebooks that are thinner. Also on each side of the drive are two more mounting points. Just like any other typical 2.5-inch solid state drive you have your SATA power and data connections on the end.

OCZ ARC 100

OCZ actually makes it a little difficult if you want to get into this drive. The screws to open the drive up are under the blue sticker on the top of the drive. Once you remove those 4 screws you can open the drive up and get inside. The does sort of ruin the look of the drive though, which is a little disappointing. Upon opening the drive we can see the Indilinx Barefoot 3 M10 controller in the center of the drive. There are also two Micron DRAM chips (one front / one back), these are 256 MB each.

OCZ ARC 100

There are eight Toshiba A19nm NAND flash chips on each side of the PCB of the drive. Each of these have a capacity of 16 GB, which gives the drive a RAW capacity of 256GB.

OCZ ARC 100

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