Packaging

The Drive

The drive conforms to the dimensions set forth by the 2.5" form factor. It is made out of metal to improve its durability and is 9.5 mm thick.


Team Group's Delta Max RGB SSD uses the SATA 6 Gbps interface. It is compatible with any older SATA standard, but will, in such a case, work at reduced performance. Note the little USB connector on the left side of the SSD as this is where you connect the RGB cable—if you don't connect a cable, the RGB lighting will remain off, which is fine if that's what you prefer.


Internally, the Delta Max uses 20 LEDs that can be controlled individually. Paired with the diffuser, the SSD's whole surface almost looks like a video screen.


Two cables are included. The first cable is for when your motherboard doesn't support RGB—it simply provides power, and the SSD will light up in a fixed, predefined rainbow color theme. The second cable is for connecting to the 5-pin ARGB header on your motherboard, which makes the SSD show up as a 20-LED accessory in your motherboard's RGB software, and integrates it nicely with all its patterns and controls. Just to clarify, you only connect one cable, which one depends on your motherboard's RGB support.


The SSD consists of three main components: The bottom piece consists of an outer metal shell that houses two PCBs, one for the SSD and another for the RGB. The middle plate contains the 20 LEDs and some white diffusor plastic. The top piece works as a secondary diffusor.


While it looks like it's mirror-coated, the shiny surface is actually semi-transparent and lets through some light. Note how the Team Group logo has no silver paint, which makes it lit up when the lighting is on—almost like the logo itself is illuminated—great idea.


The LED PCB is relatively simple, housing just a microcontroller.


Here you see the LEDs pictured, running along the outer edge of the middle plate. As mentioned before, there's 20 LEDs in total, 10 on each side.


On the rather compact PCB, you'll find two NAND flash chips, the controller, and two DRAM chips.

Chip Component Analysis

The Silicon Motion SM2258G SATA 6 Gb/s flash controller supports four flash-channels.


The four TLC flash chips are made by Samsung, using their 48-layer 3D NAND production process. Team Group has rebranded them with their own markings and logo.


Two 512 MB DRAM chips are installed on the 1 TB version to provide storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.