Cavalry Storage Pelican 64GB External SSD Review

Interior Impressions

While packaging, accessories and even external looks is all well and fine; the proof is in the pudding as they say, and even the most plain external designs can hide a veritable Cornucopia of tech surprises. So, let’s pry the top off and peer inside to see what we can find.


If you remember our Patriot Warp 2 SSD review, the layout of the Pelican will be vaguely familiar. While this board is upside down in comparison to the Warp's, when you flip the it over you are greeted to what boils down to the exact same layout. However, there is one crucial tweak. At one end you have your SATA power and data connectors, with the SSD controller chip and then two rows of four NAND MLC flash chips (with another 8 chips soldered to the other side of the board) making it for a grand total of 1 controller chip and 16 NAND flash chips. Unlike the Patriot, the Pelican has a mini USB connector next to the standard SATA power and data connectors.


The I/O controller chip shown above is, as expected, a JMicron model 602b. JMicron 602b never did live up to the PR promises and hype surrounding it and is now at least one or two generations removed from the best controllers out there. However, one feature which usually gets lost in the background noise when discussing this controller is the fact this controller not only has single port SATA 2 controller capabilities but is also a single USB port capable controller.

This means it meets the SATA 2.6 specs and is also compliant with Universal Serial Bus Specification Revision 2.0 and Compliant with USB Mass Storage Class specification version 1.0. This in a nut shell means it can act as a USB controller as well as an SATA controller. More importantly, this right here is the reason the Pelican drive is able to run as SATA or USB, without resorting to a secondary on-board controller.

As we will see later in testing the JM602b may not be the latest and greatest SATA controller around….but it’s more than powerful enough for USB operations and is probably overkill for that application. Actually it is probably a lot more powerful than the controllers which are found in most USB thumb drives. Is this a second chance for an aging controller? Will this controller finally find a niche where it can excel at (or at leas be considered good enough)? Who knows, but we will certainly find out later in the testing phase!


The NAND chips used in the Pelican are Samsung K9LBG08U0M-PCB0. Using the handy dandy online Samsung model Decoder we can see these are 1st generation lead free (ROHS compliant), 2.7V ~ 3.6V, 25 nanosecond NAND chips. This model is rated at a density of 32Gbits or 4GB per chip and has an operating temperature range listed as “Commercial” or 0°C to 70°C. Above the model number we can see these were made in the 34th week of 2008 (834) and below it we can see the batch number (or at least what we assume is the batch number but is describe by Samsung vaguely as “Customer List Reference” only).

To put all this another way, except for the fact that these chips do not have Dual nCE (Dual Chip Enable control) & Dual R/nB (Dual Ready/Busy Output) and are (in some cases) a smaller density, they are awfully darn similar to the MLC Samsung chips in the other SSDs we have reviewed, but are still inferior non the less. Lacking one or two options may not sound like a big difference but even small differences can have huge impacts on performance when we are talking about MLC NAND chips.

All in all, the Pelican looks a lot like many older SSDs out there; however this is not necessarily a bad thing since it is still a major improvement in what you will find in most USB thumb drives. Basically, it's better to consider this an over engineered thumb drive rather than an outdated OS SSD.