14 DAY TRIAL // Solid state drives designed for the PCI Express interface are normally as large as sound or graphics cards, but Toshiba decided it was high time that stopped being the case. Or so it seems.
PCI Express SSDs have many advantages, like greater storage capacity and huge transfer speed, but they are also larger than SATA units and can only be installed in a limited number on motherboards, compared to SATA ones.
Toshiba couldn't do anything about the last issue, since it's not the one that dictates how many PCI Express slots a mainboard has.
However, it did feel that it would be a good trade-off to give up the huge capacity in order to make the SSD massively smaller than usual.
Toshiba releases the BG Series of SSDs
The BG SSDs are still under development, but Toshiba managed to bring one or two to the Consumer Electronics Show taking place in Las Vegas, Nevada (CES 2015).
It used the same technology as in eMMC (enterprise multimedia cards) to create a very small SSD with a PCB barely larger than the NAND Flash chip.
Indeed, the PCB is only there to hold the chip and allow it to plug into the PCI Express slot, nothing else. Altogether, the device measures 16 x 20 x 1.65 mm / 0.62 x 0.78 x 0.06 inches. It's the world's smallest removable module type SSD, in case you hadn't already assumed as much.
Toshiba also plans to release single-package SSDs, just the chips as it were, which will be soldered directly onto notebook and tablet motherboards.
Practical applications
The new Toshiba PCI Express solid state drives possess PCI Express, a high speed serial I/O interface for PCs, as well as physical interface and NVM Express optimized for SSDs as a command interface.
They will have a weight of less than one gram, 98% lighter than 2.5-inch standard SATA SSD types. The storage capacity reduction is of 95% though, which is why over 256 GB capacities are impossible on current fabrication technologies.
Mobile PCs will surely become lighter than ever because of this, and longer lived since the space taken by a standard SSD would be free to be occupied by an extended battery pack.
Similarly, desktops using PCI Express Toshiba BG Series SSDs will have a lot of room for airflow and cables, not to mention other hardware, while providing their PC with SSD caching a lot faster than anything enabled over SATA or even M.2.
Sadly, pricing and availability details aren't available. Toshiba is still working on the prototypes here.