Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
Data Storage

China is About To Launch SSDs So Small You Insert Them Like a SIM Card (theverge.com) 44

Posted by msmash from the for-what-it's-worth dept.
A Chinese storage manufacturer has developed a solid-state drive smaller than a U.S. penny that delivers sequential read speeds of 3,700 megabytes per second, according to The Verge.

The "Mini SSD" by Biwin measures 15mm x 17mm x 1.4mm thick and connects via PCIe 4x2, offering 512GB to 2TB capacities. The drive inserts into devices using a SIM card-style tray mechanism and claims IP68 water resistance plus three-meter drop protection. Two gaming portables announced at ChinaJoy will include slots for the drives: GPD's Win 5 handheld and OneNetbook's OneXPlayer Super X hybrid laptop/tablet, both powered by AMD's Strix Halo processors. The Mini SSD outpaces MicroSD Express cards used in Nintendo Switch 2 by nearly four times, though full-size M.2 drives remain faster at up to 14,000MB/s.

China is About To Launch SSDs So Small You Insert Them Like a SIM Card More | Reply

China is About To Launch SSDs So Small You Insert Them Like a SIM Card

Comments Filter:

  • Why Not just M.2? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Lemmeoutada Collecti ( 588075 ) <obereon@[ ]il.com ['gma' in gap]> on Friday August 15, 2025 @11:24AM (#65592012) Journal

    What I don't understand is why there is no card/slot for M.2 drives. Even a full length one is not much larger than a USB drive, and the slot could be made similar to a larger USB-C style connector. Is there something technological, like trace length limitations, that makes that difficult?

    • I think the reason may have to do with mechanical properties of the connectors. They are not designed for frequent insertion/removal cycles that an external slot would imply.

      Otherwise, I don't think an SATA M.2 drive would not have problems with trace lengths. NVMe might be more difficult.

    • I don't think those are hot-swappable? Maybe they are but i've never seen it or tried it.

    • Re:Why Not just M.2? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by blackomegax ( 807080 ) on Friday August 15, 2025 @11:43AM (#65592064) Journal
      Does nobody remember expresscard? It had a narrow slot format that would be perfect. There were slot-in SSD's for the format back then as well.

      • I do remember ExpressCard, but mostly for wireless or ethernet adaptors, firewire adaptors, fingerprint readers, sound cards of all things and SD card readers, but not many storage devices. I'm not saying they didn't exist, but I think by the time they were small enough to physically fit in the slot and had enough capacity to be useful everyone was already using FW/USB2 and there just wasn't much of a market for them. Most of the features that people really wanted in a portable ended up being integrated whe

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      You are confused about measurements. And about heat transfer. And that is why you do not understand this product.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      What I don't understand is why there is no card/slot for M.2 drives. Even a full length one is not much larger than a USB drive, and the slot could be made similar to a larger USB-C style connector. Is there something technological, like trace length limitations, that makes that difficult?

      There is.

      It's called SD Card Express - and yes, we're talking the same as the Nintendo Switch 2, which was one of the first widely available devices to use it. It's basically NVMe in an SD card form factor.

      There's also CFe

      • eSATAp should have been standardized, all those useless esataports would be usb ports.

        just like HDMI should have been bidirectional from the start so all the laptop/AIO ewaste could be screens for other things.

    • The M.2 slot is a direct link to the PCIe bus (and thus, direct memory access). In many use cases it would be unwise to have it exposed to passersby. It would also react poorly to high voltage.

      We went through this pain already with USB bus, I'd wager PCIe direct access would be worse.

      • PCIe direct access is what Thunderbolt is. And there's an ACL in the firmware to allow devices to connect or not in order to at least give some opt-in security to it.

        We already solved this.

      • > I'd wager PCIe direct access would be worse

        That's kinda what a Thunderbolt port is.

        Only the newest ones support encryption keys for bus access, IIRC.

        We had to superglue 1394 ports back in the day that weren't used. Basically a memory tap ready to go for any passersby.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      That kind of hot swap exists for servers, but for general consumer stuff there is USB. It can move gigabytes per second.

    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      It's widely available, it's just consumers aren't usually exposed to it given it's considered a niche concept.

      (Hotswap SATA probably fulfills the use case most people have, of a fast backup drive not hampered by USB's slowness and clumsy connection system.)

  • At about the size of a human nail I can imagine loads of uses for this. Computers can get even smaller with this, which would be a real advantage. Devices which need to be small (such as phones) can absolutely make good use of this.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by taustin ( 171655 )

      MicroSDs have been around for years, in that range of capacity, and are actually a little bit smaller. (Slower, though.)

      • Sounds like all they did was change the interface to existing nand type storage. As you say, uSD has been around for awhile and already things like the pi use them for "hard drives".

  • Endurance? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by whoever57 ( 658626 ) on Friday August 15, 2025 @11:30AM (#65592036) Journal

    What's the endurance of these drives? How many write cycles before failure?

  • Imagine it, but with 1xPCIe 5 (Score:3)

    by williamyf ( 227051 ) on Friday August 15, 2025 @11:53AM (#65592076)

    The extra expense of the PCIe 5 circuitry would be balanced by having 1 less amplificator and one less set of Pads to the external world, while maintaning speed.

    Wins all around.

    The next Speed Bump will come with PCIe 6

    Hope this, or something like it, gets standarized across the industry, like what happened with Dell's CAMM, that Del gave free of charge to JEDEC, so that CAMM2 could become an indsutry wide neutral standard.

  • MicroSD has been around for 20 years now, and it's been another 6 years of SD before that. They can now fit tons of storage in the format, but they can't bump it up to modern performance speeds. It's time to find a new format that overcomes that. Now I'm not saying that this is necessarily the right answer, but it's certainly something in the right direction.

    • Why kill it? SD cards express already is capable of using the PCI standard, and already supports up to 128TB and PCI 4/NVMe interfaces speeds up to 3.940MB/sec. I said the SD express specifications support it, but there aren't any real world implementations for it, yet. Maybe this SSD mentioned in the article is just using this standard.

  • .. of the IBM Microdrive, which fit in a Compact Flash slot and contained an actual spinning magnetic disk.

  • SSDs are heat producing units. How is the heat dissipation going to be handled? It can be throttled, but what that does it give a nice spike of I/O at the start until thermal pressure compensation kicks in, and then the throughput hits the skids.

  • Pennies are British. America has cents, or will until 2026, when they're scheduled to be discontinued. We'll have to see if that actually flies.

    I see that we are told how fast the drives that are faster than these are but, not how fast these are. Brilliant!

    Anyway, I'm sure we all look forward to having drives that can be inserted nasally.

    • >"Pennies are British. America has cents"

      I have never heard anyone in the USA call the physical coins "cents." We call them "pennies" but the value measurement is in cents. For example, my change is four cents and I will be given four pennies. "I found a penny" (not "I found a cent".)

      Pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      And "China" didn't do anything, a Chinese company did. Some very weird headlines lately.

  • I've seen ultra cheap TB SD cards sold online that will gladly accept the rated storage capacity, but in reality they just overwrite a much smaller capacity over and over. While I think the tech the OP cites is legit, there will almost certainly be knockoff products that are not.

    When it comes to your data, never trust. Always verify.

  • Will this bring back the slots to insert extra storage on phones? It seems like only the less expensive phones have that option, but people still want this ability on flagships.

  • This is pretty neat for sure.

    On the other hand I can exhaust all my PCI lanes with an array the size of a match box!

    C'mon, AMD, let's get 128 lanes on a Ryzen already.

    Don't need more Hertz.

  • Why do we pretend that all Chinese companies are the country? We don't say "The USA is launching a new CPU" when Intel releases something. We don't say "Korea is producing a foldable phone" when Samsung announced the Flip.

    So bizarre the way people talk about China. Biwin launched this

    • That is not pretending. If a chinese company does not adhere to communist party wishes, it does not exist. Why do you think anyone and his grandmother can just copy and massproduce any product there and do it in a month or less? Cause that'ts the whole countries strategy. Not a coincidence.

Slashdot Top Deals

This is a good time to punt work.

Close