Samsung's spacious new 512 GB SSD is smaller than a stamp
The PM971-NVMe fits up to 512GB of NAND flash, a controller, and RAM into a single BGA chip measuring 20mm x 16mm x 1.5mm and weighing just one gram, the company said.
The chip's small size doesn’t mean it’ll be slow, either. Samsungs says the PM971-NVMe will hit 1.5GBps read speeds and 800MBps write speeds.
The PM971-NVMe is built using 20nm NAND chips and includes 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM as a cache. The NAND is triple-level cell but uses a portion as a write buffer. The drive will come in 512GB, 256GB and 128GB capacities. Samsung didn’t say what interface it’ll connect to the PC with, but its size means it can be mounted to the standard M.2 card and possibly directly integrated into tablet and laptop motherboards.
Why this matters: Devices such as the Surface Pro aren’t getting thicker. Spacious, yet tiny smaller SSDs will allow manufacturers to shrink mobile PCs even further.