Pictures and Breakdown
The exterior of the Striker really doesn’t have to much going on. Mushkin went with a rough black powdercoat finish. It has a lot of texture, more than the aluminum cases especially. On top we have the red, black, and grey design on the product sticker. Along with that you get all of the other information here as well. For starters it has the capacity, but beyond that you also have the model number and serial number, a note that this is a SATA3 drive, and then all of the required logos like the RoHS and FCC logos. The drive itself is a standard 2.5 inch drive and it is a thin drive with its 7mm thickness. That means this will work in Ultrabooks that support the 7mm 2.5 inch form factor.
Nothing special going on here. Just the standard power and SATA3 data connection.
The back of the drive is a little interesting. You have mounting holes to mount the Striker from the bottom or the sides of the drive. What you won’t find on the sides or the bottom though are any screws holding the casing together. Mushkin actually snap fit the drive together. Oddly enough there wasn’t a void if opened sticker on this drive for me to damage when I went to get inside.
To get inside I used a small flathead screwdriver to slip into a few of the gaps and pop the two pieces apart. When I got inside, I was surprised to find out that even inside they didn’t use any screws. The PCB actually snaps or slides right into the casing and locks into place. Using the same technique that I used to get into the drive I was able to pop it right out as well.
With the PCB pulled out we finally get a little better look at what is going on inside the Striker. For starters in the middle we have the Phison PS3110-S10 controller. This is a 32 bit quad core controller with eight channels. Next to the controller we have a 256MB Nanya NT5CC256M16CP-D1 DDR3-1600 SDRAM chip that is used for caching. For NAND they went with Micron's 16nm 128Gbit MLC NAND. There are four NAND on each side giving them a capacity of 60GB each to reach our 480 overall capacity. All of that is on a blue PCB with metal all along the left and right sides to ground to the case.
