Samsung Starts Mass Producing New 512GB NVMe SSD That's Smaller Than a Stamp (pcworld.com) 75
An anonymous reader writes from a report via PCWorld: Samsung announced late Monday night that it has begun mass producing a new SSD that is tinier than a postage stamp. PCWorld reports: "The PM971-NVMe fits up to 512GB of NAND flash, a controller, and RAM into a single BGA chip measuring 20mm x 16mm x 1.5mm and weighing just one gram, the company said. Samsung says the PM971-NVMe will hit 1.5GBps read speeds and 800MBps write speeds. The PM971-NVMe is built using 20nm NAND chips and includes 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM as a cache. The NAND is triple-level cell but uses a portion as a write butter. The drive will come in 512GB, 256GB and 128GB capacities." While on the topic of hardware, Intel unveiled its Broadwell-E family, which consists of an "Extreme Edition" Core i7 chipset that has 10 cores and 20 threads.
Stamp-sized SSDs... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Stamp-sized SSDs... (Score:3, Informative)
They are priced like extremely rare collector stamps.
Re: Stamp-sized SSDs... (Score:4, Informative)
They are priced like extremely rare collector stamps.
EXCEPT that the ones with errors do not sell for a premium.
Re:Stamp-sized SSDs... (Score:5, Funny)
Stamp-sized SSDs; that's awesome!
What's a stamp?
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It's the five Dogecoins you pay when you send an email.
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What's a stamp?
It's what you put in your grandmother's green stamps book to exchange for a new living room lamp at S&H.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%26H_Green_Stamps [wikipedia.org]
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The NAND isn't 20nm (Score:2, Informative)
The LPDDR4 is 20nm. The NAND is their 48 layer vnand per the linked article. Pretty impressive amount of packaging/die stacking going on there.
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You can already get 256gb SDcards.
What I am more interested in, is why isnt there a more user friendly SSD socket type out there akin to SDCard.
Your typical SDCard socket has ample interconnect leads and good enough conductivity to be driven similarly to a SATA device, and could even be seen as a SATA device. If this device is that small, the market for feild upgradable SSDs on ultrathin or ultracompact devices at SATA speeds is a deal changer. It makes me wonder why nobody has done it yet.
I could see cons
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A drive going too fast for the interface is a tolerable problem that can be solved later.
A drive that is needlessly slow on the other hand....
Again, the idea here is for a friendly socket, like SDCard, into which such a tiny SSD can be inserted easily. SATA is just a nice industry standard interface with existing drivers that can be leveraged. You see this frequently with M.2 based SSDs. They present themselves as really fast SATA devices on their own dedicated controller. The idea here would be similar.
If
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The idea here is not to drive an sdcard that fast (that wont work, because that is now how sdcards are designed to work.).
The idea is to create an ssd socket that looks and feels like an sdcard type form factor for practical handling, transport, and installation purposes, but which is actually its own thing inside, capable of SSD type speeds over a very short serial interface. (the interconnect will measure in centimeters! Noise from high speed transmission will be minimal.)
By having a device like that, in
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There are already XQD cards [wikipedia.org] that seem to meet your criteria. Nikon has the interface on their higher end carmeras. The are bigger than SD cards, but more robust looking and still smaller than the old CF cards.
XQD uses PCI express to transfer data so the interface shouln't be a bootleneck at the moment.
My understanding is that SD had a controller on board to be easily imeplemented on portable devices which didn't have a PCIe bus.
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SD cards actually speak four different interfaces, depending on application. You can run them off an SPI interface if you want to, though it's really very slow. It's still a useful trick because a lot of microcontrollers have SPI hardware support (including atmega/arduino) and others can bit-bang it, so you can interface a microcontroller to an SD card with next to no supporting hardware.
The other three modes are all high-speed modes, but require more elaborate electronics.
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It probably does not matter for the application because people are not aware of the problem and manufacturers do not advertise it but I do not think power loss protection during writes can be implemented in such a small format unless it is added outside of the drive which would require more to the interface specification.
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Fourty-eight layers? Damn. So the NAND is like.... onions? /Shrek
I cant believe its not write butter. (Score:1)
mmmmmm, write butter....
Write butter? (Score:3, Funny)
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"20mm x 16mm x 1.5mm and weighing just 1 g" (Score:4, Interesting)
It would cost a small fortune, but you could easily fit 50TB or more of data in a 1" x 3.5" HDD form factor.
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Heat?
They would probably burn pretty hot, but yes, the possibilities are rather startling. It will be an interesting day when SSDs overtake HDDs on practical metrics such as data density, and even more so on price.
Any predictions on when that is going to happen?
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Heat?
Good point. Could you stack two layers separated by head sinks? You'd obviously need vent holes, though.
It would give 25TB capacity: 512GB/stamp at 5 stamps wide, 5 stamps deep (need some room for control & power circuits) and two layers high.
when SSDs overtake HDDs on practical metrics such as data density
I think that day has arrived.
and even more so on price.
5 years?
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You can get a 1TB SSD for $255 (or less) today from several real name brand manufacturers. That means after 13 iterations of doubling transistor density, we'd have 8,192TB SSD (someone doub
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Moore's law cannot continue for another thirteen iterations for a very simple practical reason: It's difficult to make parts smaller than one atom. Atomic spacing for silicon is 0.5nM - that's the absolute, all-you're-getting limit even if every engineering problem is solved.
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nm, not nM. Hard to remember all these units!
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Like multi-bit storage in programmable quantum dynamic wave function overlap on atom scale or so...
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Am I have a bad morning? This thread is making me want to scream. "Moore's law", "5 years?" Anyone else want to pile in with a tired fatuity? Surf's up, apparently, for a tiny value of "surf".
The following video (from January 2016) contains just about everything worth knowing at this point about Intel's forthcoming phantom memory. Don't even try reading anything else unless you got a bone for chalcogenide chemistry.
Rick Coulson of Intel on 3D XPoint and NVMe [youtube.com]
Executive summary: Charge-storage memory is a
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...head sinks...
You mean your head stinks?
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Yes. Sorry.
Re: "20mm x 16mm x 1.5mm and weighing just 1 g" (Score:1)
The density thing happened a long time ago. 3.84TB SFF SSD have been on the market for about a year, with 7.68 due out very soon.
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Guys, I was asking after "practical density". Of course the chip density is insane, just look at a 256 or 512GB micro SD card!!!!
There must be some practical issues getting in the way, whether it's heat, interconnects, or just plain dumb cost. However, what I was pondering, was when will we be able to buy a 10TB 3.5" form factor SSD? Just as we can for spinning rust [computerworld.com].
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Holy shit, I stand 100% corrected! Thanks!
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They would probably burn pretty hot, but yes, the possibilities are rather startling. It will be an interesting day when SSDs overtake HDDs on practical metrics such as data density, and even more so on price. Any predictions on when that is going to happen?
There's already 200GB MicroSD cards [bhphotovideo.com] and 16TB 2.5" SSDs [cdw.com] for sale, so I'm pretty sure density is a long won match. Price/GB is another matter, but HDDs don't scale down. I just checked and if you only need 128 GB of space, you pay the same for a HDD as for a SSD. Sure, the HDD will be 500GB but if you don't need it because cloud, streaming etc. you can't save more by buying a smaller HDD. And if you don't want one for a boot drive, you have the budget for a 256GB SSD before SSD+HDD becomes cheaper. I really d
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Heat?
They would probably burn pretty hot, but yes, the possibilities are rather startling. It will be an interesting day when SSDs overtake HDDs on practical metrics such as data density, and even more so on price.
Any predictions on when that is going to happen?
It has. DARPA. At all length scales, save for the smallest. I apologize for spawning the "thermal via" frenzy of the past few years. Sorry.
Chipset? (Score:2)
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But will it support ads? (Score:5, Funny)
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-1 Offtopic for BeauHD. (Score:3)
While on the topic of hardware, Intel unveiled its Broadwell-E family, which consists of an "Extreme Edition" Core i7 chipset that has 10 cores and 20 threads.
Stop. This. Stupid. Shit. Now.
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In sort-of related news, the new Windows 10 update will allow you to have big, long filenames on your itty-bitty stamp-sized SSD.
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In not-quite-but-still-sort-of related news, "the iPod has no wireless and has less space than a Nomad. Lame."
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Presumably so that anyone who hasn't upgraded to Windows 10 will have a good reason to do so if they don't want their software crashing upon encountering long filenames.
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It actually runs a special version of MS-DOS which can run up to 20 programs concurrently (up to 20 users).
In that mode though, each program is limited to 64K memory. One trick is to reserve a 64K ramdisk for several programs to communicate with although you can run 19 programs then. Failing that, just plug null-modem cables between some of the COM ports on the back of the PC and call it done..
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Why the fuck do I still know that shit in 2027?
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Oups, I meant 2016!
2016!!
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Younger readers may not understand this (Score:2)
Zits' Jeremy "What's a stamp?"
http://zitscomics.com/comics/s... [zitscomics.com]