Samsung Announces 512GB NVMe SSD That's Smaller Than a Stamp
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
Today, ignoring this new drive, you can buy a 1TB m.2 SSD that is 1/20th the size of a 2.5" disk, but the largest 2.5" SSD samsung sells is 2TB. It always seemed odd that the drive 20 times larger in physical size only has twice the capacity as the postage stamp sized version.
I wonder how large of a 2.5" disk samsung could make if cost was not an obstacle... maybe this drive (that you can't actually buy yet) is what you would get?
https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-now-introducing-worl...
There has been some effort to switch NAND to serial protocol to lower IO count but it hasn't caught on. What Samsung is doing with multi die packages is very common (one company I worked for did it 10 years ago) but there are concerns with signal integrity and thermal limits to consider. It will generally have slower performance than the full models or use power throttling to keep within limits (good for burst workloads.)
The SSD is much faster, but there's no BGA socket on the side of my laptop. There is an SD slot.
Judging by the dimensions, I think it might be just possible to make a 1 TB SDXC card using the same silicon as Samsung's new SSD. Now that would be interesting. It would need a different (non-BGA) package though, and it would still be a tight fit. I'm looking forward to 10 nm.