World's Smallest 512GB SSD Is Half The Weight Of A Dime

Megalith

Megalith

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These should come in handy as companies obsess over making smaller and slimmer devices. Supposedly, this guy can transfer a 5GB-equivalent, full-HD movie in about three seconds.

Samsung's PM971-NVMe SSD is aimed at ultra-thin notebooks and was manufactured by combining 16 of Samsung's 48-layer 256-gigabit (Gb) V-NAND flash chips, one 20-nanometer 4Gbit LPDDR4 mobile DRAM chip and a high-performance Samsung controller. The new SSD is just 20mm x 16mm x 1.5mm in size and weighs about one gram, less than half the weight of a U.S. dime (2.3 grams). The single-package SSD's volume is approximately a hundredth of a 2.5-in form factor SSD or hard disk drive, and its surface area is about one-fifth of an M.2 SSD, which is a little larger than a postage stamp.
 
gxp500 said:
The iphone 6s uses nvme.
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Ah, I didn't know. There's probably other phones that do too by now. UFS is still more common.

The ridiculous pricing model that phone manufacturers use per GB makes me shudder to think what they would charge for a phone with 512GB built in.
 
DF-1 said:
surface pro 5 plz, ty.
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A surface pro with two of these would make that machine a day-one buy for me. I skipped the 4 because it was barely an upgrade for me. Fingers crossed for the Pro 5 announcement.
 
Meh I already have a kid. I would rip out a left nut and install a ball size thing of this memory in my testicle and store like the whole encyclopedia Brittanica in there. Once in a while a just my junk to speed the loading time while winning every episode of jepeordy.
 
pxc said:
Do any phones support NVMe? There will probably be similar products based on the UFS interface which more phones use.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but since this has its own built in controller and buffer, wouldn't all the phone's chipset need is a solitary PCIe lane?

The only concern I'd have would be primarily the additional power draw, since it does have its own controller and not using the chipset's storage interface. Small second concern would be thermal output but I suspect it's not too bad even if it's a first gen (or, well, prototype perhaps).

Nevertheless, I see this being a potential game changer given the size and amount of storage it offers in said tiny package. It'd be cool to have a USB-sized PCIe x1 port for storage like this that you can plug a tiny thumbdrive into for fast performance. Sure it wouldn't be as fast as Lightningbolt, but better on account of every computer having support since it's just PCIe.
 
westrock2000 said:
It's $100 per tier, and the tiers are not any set number. I have a 128GB model and it was not 8x $100 over the base 16GB model, I think it was $2-$300 more.
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I get the context that you posted this in, but I think it's so weird that people accept this gouging like it's no big deal. An entire iPhone 6 Plus costs less than $250 to manufacture, for perspective.

The price difference between a 128GB NVMe and 16GB NVMe NAND flash device in quantity is less than $30. You can even buy the same 128GB chip (1024Gb x 8 NAND flash) used in the iPhone 6 in quantity one for under $44.
 
pxc said:
I get the context that you posted this in, but I think it's so weird that people accept this gouging like it's no big deal. An entire iPhone 6 Plus costs less than $250 to manufacture, for perspective.

The price difference between a 128GB NVMe and 16GB NVMe NAND flash device in quantity is less than $30. You can even buy the same 128GB chip (1024Gb x 8 NAND flash) used in the iPhone 6 in quantity one for under $44.
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They have to fund an entire company, it's not just about breaking even on manufacturing costs. Do you think it costs Samsung/Intel/Micron $44 to make that chip....they are "price gouging" as well.

I understand the mantra in the computer world that things should be as cheap as possible and the only premiums are those that can be measured with data. I just don't feel that way.
 
westrock2000 said:
They have to fund an entire company, it's not just about breaking even on manufacturing costs. Do you think it costs Samsung/Intel/Micron $44 to make that chip....they are "price gouging" as well.
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That's not the issue. My cost comparison between a storage increase and an entire phone was just to illustrate how ridiculous it is.

The problem is that while the general trends in technology favor "more for less" or "faster and cheaper" over time, there have been a couple of notable cases where artificial scarcity is used to increase prices over time. One is in data bandwidth and other other is integrated storage. I'm not against denying Apple a profit, or even a healthy profit (which it does: Apple has the by far largest profit margins on phones). But it's ridiculous to gouge so much on what is a relatively small cost difference between NAND flash sizes.

You may not care, but it's ridiculously damaging for technology progress.
 
If I was a traditional hard drive manufacturer, I'd be very concerned. Makes sense that WD bought Sandisk. Seagate has something coming soon.
 
westrock2000 said:
They have to fund an entire company, it's not just about breaking even on manufacturing costs. Do you think it costs Samsung/Intel/Micron $44 to make that chip....they are "price gouging" as well.

I understand the mantra in the computer world that things should be as cheap as possible and the only premiums are those that can be measured with data. I just don't feel that way.
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I agree with you to a certain extent. They are going to sell stuff for whatever they can get away with and right now people are willing to pay tons of money for their stuff. I still think Apple tax is ridiculously high for higher "tiers" though, especially considering they are already have huge margins even on the lowest capacity models.

I don't even think their OS is that intuitive either. I've had to help people who have never used a smartphone before and iOS makes no sense to them at all. Similar to MacOS vs Windows it's really more about what you are used to than one of them being intrinsically more intuitive.
 
SparkedFire said:
If I was a traditional hard drive manufacturer, I'd be very concerned. Makes sense that WD bought Sandisk. Seagate has something coming soon.
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They are certainly going to be losing out in the consumer space in the coming years, but I imagine the big data centers (who buy LOTS of drives) will still be using mostly HDDs for many years to come. HDDs just offer so much more capacity for the money. That doesn't really matter in the consumer space where most people are only using 100-200GB on their PC anyway, but it matters a lot for places that are storing petabytes of data.
 
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