Samsung has announced that it is mass-producing the first NVMe SSD that fits into a single ball grid array package, fitting all of the SSD components — NAND flash memory, DRAM and controller — in an area not larger than that of a coin. Called PM971-NVMe, the SSDs will be available in storage capacities up to 512GB, and will be up for sale starting in June.
With dimensions of 20 x 16 x 1.5mm and an overall weight that's just one gram, the PM971-NVMe's volume is a hundredth of a standard 2.5-inch SSD, with a surface area that's a fifth of the newer M.2 SSDs. Samsung was able to sandwich 16 of its 48-layer 256-gigabit V-NAND flash chips (resulting in a total of 240GB storage), a 20nm 4Gb LPDDR4 DRAM chip, and a controller into the PM971-NVMe.
The drive will be available in 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB variants, and offers random read and write IOPS of up to 190K and 150K. Samsung is claiming sequential read and write speeds of 1500MB/s and 900MB/s when used with its TurboWrite technology.
Jung-bae Lee, senior vice president at Samsung's storage division, had this to say:
Samsung's new BGA NVMe SSD triples the performance of a typical SATA SSD, in the smallest form factor available, with storage capacity reaching up to 512GB. The introduction of this small-scale SSD will help global PC companies to make timely launches of slimmer, more stylish computing devices, while offering consumers a more satisfactory computing environment.
