Samsung's new 512GB solid state drive is impossibly tiny

Shawn Knight

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Samsung is now mass producing an impossibly tiny solid state drive for use in ultraportable notebooks and next-generation PCs.

The PM971-NVMe is the industry’s first NVMe PCIe SSD in a single ball grid array (BGA) package. It was created by combining 16 of Samsung’s 48-layer 256-gigabit (Gb) V-NAND flash chips, one 20-nanometer 4Gb LPDDR4 mobile DRAM chip and a high-performance controller.

Jung-bae Lee, senior vice president of memory product planning & application engineering team at Samsung Electronics, said the new BGA NVMe SSD triples the performance of a typical SATA SSD with capacities of up to 512GB.

The drive-on-a-chip is capable of sequential read and write speeds of up to 1,500MB/s (megabytes per second) and 900MB/s respectively, when TurboWrite technology is used. Random read and write IOPS (input output operations per second), meanwhile, check in at up to 190,000 and 150,000, respectively.

Even more impressive, however, is its size.

The SSD measures 20mm x 16mm x 1.5mm (smaller than a postage stamp) and weighs roughly one gram. In comparison, a new penny weighs 2.5 grams. Its volume, Samsung says, is approximately a hundredth of a 2.5-inch SSD or HDD and its surface area is about a fifth of an M.2 SSD.

Samsung’s new PM971-NVMe SSD will be available in 128GB, 256GB and 512GB storage options. Samsung said it’ll be providing parts to customers this month.

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What makes it an SSD instead of a flash drive? It says it's made from combining pieces of flash memory.... is an SSD different from Flash?

Hopefully this will mean the end of 16GB standard in smart phones, but somehow I bet it won't. Not when you can charge for cloud storage.
 
What makes it an SSD instead of a flash drive? It says it's made from combining pieces of flash memory.... is an SSD different from Flash?

Hopefully this will mean the end of 16GB standard in smart phones, but somehow I bet it won't. Not when you can charge for cloud storage.
Well, both are non-volatile memory so technically both are flash... Though the SSD is V-NAND, which is what you'll most often hear it referred to as.
 
What makes it an SSD instead of a flash drive? It says it's made from combining pieces of flash memory.... is an SSD different from Flash?

Hopefully this will mean the end of 16GB standard in smart phones, but somehow I bet it won't. Not when you can charge for cloud storage.

https://danielmiessler.com/blog/the-difference-between-ssd-and-flash-hard-drives/

Summary
  1. SSD just means a hard disk that doesn’t move
  2. Flash is a type of memory that is very fast and doesn’t require continuous power (non-volatile)
  3. SSDs used to use RAM, but now use Flash instead
  4. In short, you shouldn’t compare Flash to SSD just as you shouldn’t compare batteries to lithium-ion. In both cases the latter is a type of the former.
 
That's just the actual module, when you add in the actual sata interface, and power circuitry it becomes a hell of a lot bigger. Yes is could be made into a micro sd style card but then the bus is going to affect the speed of the device.
 
That's just the actual module, when you add in the actual sata interface, and power circuitry it becomes a hell of a lot bigger. Yes is could be made into a micro sd style card but then the bus is going to affect the speed of the device.

What sata interface?! This is a NVMe drive, meant to be accessed by pci-e. It can be put directly on the mobile motherboard as it is a BGA package and power delivery to the chip can be made more simple/smaller than in a "traditional" SSD where chips are all around the pcb and from different vendors.
 
[/QUOTE]

One day that will be possible. Image being able to upload information to your brain and being smarter than everyone else.[/QUOTE]

and what if everyone else can also do it?
 

One day that will be possible. Image being able to upload information to your brain and being smarter than everyone else.
and what if everyone else can also do it?
You will have to be old and rich so you can have it and deny it to the rest of the masses.
 
I would like to see 64 of these put on a PCI16x card.

I would also like to see motherboard manufacturers install them on motherboards. That would make for a really quick boot time.
 
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