Samsung ships lightest, smallest SSD yet
Published: 31 May. 2016, 19:50
BGA NVMe SSD is equivalent in size to a 100-won coin. [SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS]
At 2 centimeters wide, 1.6 centimeters long and 1.5 millimeters thick - equivalent to the size of a 100-won coin - the BGA NVMe SSD contains 16 of Samsung’s 48-layer 256-gigabit V-NAND flash chips, one 20-nanometer mobile DRAM chip and a high-performance Samsung controller.
Despite all that, the BGA NVMe SSD weighs only 1 gram, which is one-100th the weight of a standard 2.5-inch hard disk drive (HDD).
The reduced size gives manufacturers much more flexibility in design, the company said.
“The introduction of this small-scale SSD will help global PC companies make timely launches of slimmer, more stylish computing devices, while offering consumers a more satisfactory computing environment,” said Lee Jung-bae, senior vice president of the memory product planning and application engineering team at Samsung Electronics.
SSDs store data on flash memory and are more durable than HDDs because they have no moving parts.
The newer drives are becoming just as common as HDDs on the latest computers, both because of a steep fall in their prices and a growing consumer preference for smaller computers that can only accommodate SSD chips.
The new SSD is available in three storage options: 512 gigabytes, 256 gigabytes and 128 gigabytes. Global shipping has already begun.
The new chip boasts a sequential read speed of 1,500 megabytes per second, triple the speed of its predecessor, and a sequential write speed of 900 megabytes per second. The enhancement makes it possible to transfer a 5-gigabyte full-HD movie in about three seconds and to download it in six seconds.
The BGA NVMe SSD is equipped with read and write input output operations per second, or IOPS, of up to 190,000 and 150,000 respectively, meaning it allows computers to better handle operating at high speeds.
When compared to traditional HDDs, which are able to processes up to 120 IOPS, the new SSD is 1,500 times faster.
SSDs were used in up to one fourth of all laptops as of the end of last year and will be included in 41 percent by the end of next year, according to a report by DRAMeXchange, a division of market research firm TrendForce.
Samsung is the world’s top producers of NAND flash and SSDs. The tech giant been controlling over 40 percent of the market and its SSD shipments rose 27.1 percent year on year to 12.93 million units in the first quarter, according to TrendFocus.
Samsung supplies SSDs to Apple, HP and Lenovo.
BY SEO JI-EUN [[email protected]]
with the Korea JoongAng Daily
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