With today’s demand for thinner devices comes the need to shrink hardware. Recently Samsung announced it had begun mass producing a new solid-state drive (SSD) tinier than a postage stamp.
The Samsung PM971-NVMe crams 512GB SSD into a single chip. Image source: Samsung.
Measuring 0.78 x 0.63 x 0.06 inches, the PM971-NVMe, as it’s called, fits up to 512GB of NAND flash, a controller, and RAM into a single chip. And don’t let the small size fool you. According to Samsung, it’ll hit 1.5GBps read speeds and 800MBps write speeds, weighing in at about 0.04 of an ounce (1 gram).
The PM971 doesn’t connect to a computer through a conventional (SATA) connection, but instead can be directly installed on the motherboard, drastically increasing its speeds. Impressively, Samsung said the tiny drive can download a 5GB HD movie in about six seconds.
Samsung’s PM971-NVMe is tinier than a postage stamp. Image source: Samsung.
So what else is going on inside? The PM971 is built using Samsung V-NAND chips and includes 4Gb of 20nm LPDDR4 RAM as a cache. The V-NAND is triple-level cell, but uses a portion as a write buffer.
Samsung’s new SSD allows manufacturers to offer slimmer, quicker laptops and tablets, and the small size of the latest drive could mean huge amounts of storage on future products without sacrificing volume. Currently the electronics company is mass producing 512GB, 256GB, and 128GB options, although pricing information is not yet available.
As storage components decrease in size and increase in speed (and become cheaper), we could be seeing plenty of high-gigabyte numbers on future smartphones without needing to dish out over $1,000.
Source: Mashable
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