14 DAY TRIAL // Solid-state drives are interesting things, capable of taking more shapes than the IT industry knows what to do with. Plextor seems to have warmed up to the NGFF form factor right now.
Next-generation form factor is a very small form factor that would have been pointless to seek a decade ago, due to the size of memory and storage chips at the time.
With NAND and DRAM chips now capable of storing so much more, though, NGFF can actually have high storage capacities, just like flash drives.
Indeed, one might even say that NGFF solid-state drives are basically very small flash drives without a case and with different connectors than USB.
Speaking of which, the Plextor NGFF SSD revealed by Hardware.info measures just 42 x 22 mm (1/65 x 0.86 inches) and connects to the rest of a laptop's hardware via PCI-Express 2.0 x2 interface.
TLC NAND chips (triple-level cell) are spread across the PCB, amounting to a capacity of 128 GB or 256 GB, depending on model.
As for performance, the Marvell 88SS9189 processor can achieve a transfer speed of 700 MB/s when reading and 550 MB/s when writing. That's faster than SATA 6 Gbps would allow, and partially owed to the 256 MB and 512 MB of DDR3 DRAM cache memory.
As for 4K random write performance, it is of up to 100,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second).
Plextor isn't yet selling the new solid-state drive. It expects to only start shipping it when Intel releases the fourth-generation Core-series central processing units, in June (Haswell).
We would not be surprised if all branded notebook vendors at least considered using NGFF drives though. There are definite benefits, although the price will be a problem, like on any SSD-equipped system. And the newcomer doesn't exactly lend itself well to SSD caching with that capacity range, so there won't be many hybrid setups with it either.