Perhaps the most respect an SSD review site can gain is to be trusted to report on SSDs that carry with them a great deal of confidentiality and secrecy in their purpose and design.

Being consistently chosen as the first and one of the very limited evaluators is icing on the cake. Such is the case between The SSD Review and TCS and has been for some time as we have previously published reports for the TCS Galatea and TCS Proteus SSDs.

Our report today is rather special as we are looking at an entirely new design from TCS, one that has been aptly named the TCS BGADrive. The TCS BGADrive was released in January 2013 and one can’t imagine the work it takes to get from a simple conversation to final hands-on analysis and report of such equipment. This has been months in the making and much more cooperation than we have ever seen for a review prior. As much as cannot be spoken of or shown, we think our end report will grab and hold your attention as the TCS BGADrive is definitely something we don’t get our hands on every day.

Two things stand out when we speak of TCS products, and these are MIL-STD-810 and the fact that these SSDs are created and trusted for ‘mission critical applications’. Defined, a mission critical application is one in which the failure of the device could result, directly or indirectly, in personal injury or death. These applications demand equipment that can stand well above the norm in pressure, shock and weather conditions, and that is what MIL-STD-810 is intended for.

To be very brief in how the TCS BGADrive meets and exceeds the military 810 standard, it is capable of sustaining altitudes of 80,000 feet, 40G shock, 16G vibration as well as temperatures that range from -40 to +85DegC. Typical applications for the BGADrive include UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) or UUVs (unmanned underwater vehicle), sometimes referred to as drones, as well as a host of other military or aeronautic applications to include surveillance equipment, medical instruments, transport equipment and a host of ruggedized military personal computer needs.

And then there is Telecommunications Systems Inc (TCS). TCS is somewhat of a James Bond of the manufacturing industry and much of the hardware they manufacturer behind the scenes will never be open to analysis and published reports. They are central to Military and Defense needs and a taste of this is evident through their Space and Defence Technology News Page of their website. Don’t stop there though as their detail of Cyber Security and Public Safety contributions will show you just how rounded TCS truly is…and how much they just may fit that James Bond comparison.

The TCS BGADrive SSD is seen here affixed to a SATA adapter which would never occur, but for our need to effectively benchmark the SSD. We only received this engineering sample after a great deal of coaxing and making the leap to publishing these photographs of the internals was not as easy as one might think:

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As clearly shown, much of the TCS BGADrive is just as we see in many other typical SSDs, right down to the controller and NAND flash memory. It is definitely one of the smallest SSDs available and guaranteed to be one of the very few that suits the need for which it is intended.