Samsung has chosen to use metal exclusively in the construction of the 830 Series casing. The top part of the casing is made from black brushed aluminum, which gives the drive an attractive appearance. The bottom part is also made from metal, which should help protect the PCB inside.

Even though the 830 Series occupies a 2.5” form factor, it’s slightly shallower in height than most drives on the market, measuring 7 mm high rather than 9.5 mm high. This shouldn’t cause any compatibility issues in the majority of systems. It also means that you can install the drive in slimline notebooks such as the Lenovo X220.

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 Figure 2: Samsung 830 Series 256 GB

The top side of the PCB is where all of the components are located. The Samsung S4LJ204X01-Y040 controller takes center stage alongside a single Samsung 256 MB K4T2G314QF-MCF7 buffer chip. There are eight Samsung K9PFGY8U7A-HCK0 32 GB memory chips in total.

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 Figure 3: Samsung 830 Series 256 GB PCB (top)

None of the capacity of the drive is lost, as the Samsung controller doesn’t use over-provisioning. Therefore, the overall capacity of the drive is 256 GB, although this is reduced to 238 GB when formatted in Windows. There are no components located on the underside of the PCB.

 
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Figure 4: Samsung 830 Series 256 GB PCB (bottom)