Thursday, August 4th 2016
Toshiba Announces New BG SSDs with 3-Bit-Per-Cell (TLC) BiCS Flash
Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. (TAEC), a committed technology leader, will showcase its new BG series solid state drive (SSD) family featuring cutting-edge BiCS FLASH with 3-bit-per-cell TLC (triple-level cell) technology and Toshiba's new single-package ball grid array (BGA) NVMe PCI Express (PCIe) Gen3 x2 SSD at the 2016 Flash Memory Summit held in Santa Clara, California between August 8 - 11. Delivering a smaller footprint, lower power consumption and better performance than traditional storage options, the BG SSD series is purpose-built for the future wave of ultra-thin mobile PCs, including 2-in-1 convertible notebooks and tablets.
With a surface area 95 percent smaller than conventional 2.5-inch SATA storage devices and 82 percent smaller than M.2 Type 22806, the Toshiba BG series condenses both the controller and NAND flash memory in a single 16 mm x 20 mm BGA package enabling device manufacturers to prioritize features like battery capacity for longer operating times. The BG series is also available mounted on a M.2 Type 22307 module for applications requiring socketed storage. BG SSDs utilize BiCS FLASH, a three-dimensional (3D) stacked cell structure, making it possible to accommodate up to 512 GB of storage capacity in this high-performance and compact form factor. Additionally, the BG series SSDs utilize an in-house Toshiba-developed controller and firmware for a full, vertically developed solution, ensuring technology is tightly integrated for optimal performance, power consumption and reliability.
"We are thrilled to unveil the new BG series with BiCS FLASH which will deliver both a rich feature-set and high performance all within an extremely small footprint and power profile," said Jeremy Werner, vice president of SSD marketing and product planning at Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. "We expect to be in production this year with BiCS FLASH BGA SSDs, offering our customers a compelling and cost-effective storage solution for the next generation of high performance ultra-thin and light notebooks and tablets."
To deliver a more compact and power efficient drive, while still delivering excellent performance in client workloads, the BG series implements the latest NVMe standard Host Memory Buffer (HMB) feature which will be showcased during the 2016 Flash Memory Summit as a reference exhibition. HMB allocates and employs host DRAM for flash management purposes in contrast to alternative solutions that contain costly and power-hungry dedicated DRAM to perform similar functions. Host Memory Buffer technology can enable increased performance over solutions without DRAM by storing lookup data on host memory to reduce access times for commonly accessed data.
The Toshiba BG SSD Family will be available in 128 GB, 256 GB or 512 GB capacities in both a 16 mm x 20 mm package (M.2 Type 1620) or a removable M.2 Type 2230 module. Samples of Toshiba BGA SSDs are initially available for limited PC OEM customers, and will be available for other customers to develop with in the fourth calendar quarter of 2016.
With a surface area 95 percent smaller than conventional 2.5-inch SATA storage devices and 82 percent smaller than M.2 Type 22806, the Toshiba BG series condenses both the controller and NAND flash memory in a single 16 mm x 20 mm BGA package enabling device manufacturers to prioritize features like battery capacity for longer operating times. The BG series is also available mounted on a M.2 Type 22307 module for applications requiring socketed storage. BG SSDs utilize BiCS FLASH, a three-dimensional (3D) stacked cell structure, making it possible to accommodate up to 512 GB of storage capacity in this high-performance and compact form factor. Additionally, the BG series SSDs utilize an in-house Toshiba-developed controller and firmware for a full, vertically developed solution, ensuring technology is tightly integrated for optimal performance, power consumption and reliability.
"We are thrilled to unveil the new BG series with BiCS FLASH which will deliver both a rich feature-set and high performance all within an extremely small footprint and power profile," said Jeremy Werner, vice president of SSD marketing and product planning at Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. "We expect to be in production this year with BiCS FLASH BGA SSDs, offering our customers a compelling and cost-effective storage solution for the next generation of high performance ultra-thin and light notebooks and tablets."
To deliver a more compact and power efficient drive, while still delivering excellent performance in client workloads, the BG series implements the latest NVMe standard Host Memory Buffer (HMB) feature which will be showcased during the 2016 Flash Memory Summit as a reference exhibition. HMB allocates and employs host DRAM for flash management purposes in contrast to alternative solutions that contain costly and power-hungry dedicated DRAM to perform similar functions. Host Memory Buffer technology can enable increased performance over solutions without DRAM by storing lookup data on host memory to reduce access times for commonly accessed data.
The Toshiba BG SSD Family will be available in 128 GB, 256 GB or 512 GB capacities in both a 16 mm x 20 mm package (M.2 Type 1620) or a removable M.2 Type 2230 module. Samples of Toshiba BGA SSDs are initially available for limited PC OEM customers, and will be available for other customers to develop with in the fourth calendar quarter of 2016.
26 Comments on Toshiba Announces New BG SSDs with 3-Bit-Per-Cell (TLC) BiCS Flash
Samsung doesn't have M.2 beyond 512GB because they can't stuff enough chips on it. Here, they have that capability, but they don't use it. Ok...
Not many want to pay $300+ for storage. Plus, what do you fill 1TB with? Because music and movies can sit on a HDD very well.
Is it only a product in lab? I had done similar product for SATA and PCIe but the thermal and yield rate are problem.
The time to go forth to the petabyte is finally here.
Will you watch a movie in 10 minutes if it's on a SSD? Listen to a whole album in 5?
Programs on a SSD make sense. Data? Not so much (because you don't have huge databases at home). And for what needs to be on a SSD, 512GB is plenty. Sure, I'd love to get rid of HDDs completely (not for the reasons you think), but hey, they're going for peanuts these days, so they still have their uses.
Since you brought it up: why do you think a HDD next to a SSD is pointless anyway?
also, with 2 of these you can make a RAID 0 setup on a small M2 disk, or stick 16 of these on a 16X card for 8 TB of storage, that would probably require some driver magic for the OS to se them as one drive, but hey, 8 TB drive with off the shelf components in a small package would be fun.
A problem could be what to do if the drive fails? do you have to change the hole motherboard, as the drive is soldered to it or is there a socket like solution like there were for old BIOS chips?
without my tinfoil hat on i would say that the adoption rate is acceptable, i mean the hdd of my first pc was a 27GB barracuda, and that was 15 years ago, thats not a long time if you think about it.
but i agree with you on the stupidity of the situation, if the companies wanted to push for faster adoption they could very easily.
I do fall into the category of those who don't want to pay.. uh.. *quickly googles prices* $200-300 US per drive to do that though.
1: 400GB Intel 750 PCI-E NVMe SSD - Main boot/files/games drive.
2: 250GB Samsung 840 SATA3 SSD - Secondary games drive.
4: 480GB OCZ Bigfoot SATA2 SSD - Downloads folder and old games.
More than enough space for all my games (media/backups are on a Synology NAS in the attic) and no need to shell out money on a huge SSD (technically the Bigfoot was the biggest on the market when I bought it but meh).