Samsung will start mass production of ultra-thin and ultra-light NVMe SSDs with a maximum capacity of 512GB. The SSDs will measure no more than 20mm x 16mm x 1.5mm and weigh only 1 gram.
The SSDs are part of Samsung's PM971-NVMe series and should allow PC manufacturers to make thinner and more stylish computers. The drives use the NVMe interface making them up to 3x faster than regular SATA-3 drives. The drives are in a single ball grid array (BGA) package which makes them look like a single chip.
The entire BGA package contains the essential SSD components including NAND flash memory, DRAM and controller. More specifically it contains 16 of Samsung’s 48-layer 256-gigabit (Gb) V-NAND flash chips, one 20-nanometer 4Gb LPDDR4 mobile DRAM chip and a high-performance Samsung controller.
Samsung specifies maximum sequential read and write speeds of 1,500MB/s and 900MB/s respectively while random read and write performance is specified a 190,000 and 150,000 IOPS.
The M971-NVMe SSD line-up in capacities of 128, 256 and 512GB should become available later this month. The Korean electronics giant hasn't disclosed any pricing details.
Later this year, Samsung plans to introduce more high-capacity and ultra-fast NVMe SSDs.
