Sandisk Debuts World's Smallest SSD Yet

siliconbits writes "Weighing less than a paper clip and smaller than a postage stamp, Sandisk's iSSD comes in a tiny Ball Grid Array and boasts support for the SATA standard, which means that it can be soldered directly on motherboards."

Comments

Summary++

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole article is just about 5 times longer than the very short summary. I didn't read it very attentively, but the following 2 quotes should be informative and reading them, I think you won't need to spend the 30 seconds it would take to read the full article:

"160MB/sec sequential read and 100MB/sec sequential write speeds being quoted."

"will target the "fast-growing" mobile computing platforms such as tablet PCs and ultra-thin notebooks (and netbooks we presume); as expected, they won't be available to consumers directly but as an integral part of devices."

Re:That's a great idea!

[v1]

heh, I hadn't even considered that, excellent counterpoint.

different from microSD?

[iamhassi]

How is this much different from a MicroSD?

--Smaller than stamp? Very much so, Check!
--4gb to 64gb? Check!
--100MB/sec read and 160MB/sec write? Hmm... well not by itself, but if you Raid 0 a few MicroSDs it'd probably reach those speeds, and we're hoping the article is correct with the MB term meaning Megabyte and not Megabit because MicroSD's also offer 100 Mbit/s

So while this is announcement is nice, I still feel like they took the same thing we've been using for the past few years, put it in a new box and labeled it as a totally new product.

Re:different from microSD?

[bluefoxlucid]

They solder a MicroSD card to a MicroSD-to-SATA controller chip (really, to the IDE front-end chip: the whole integrated drive electronics thing can skip all the physical media management stuff like stepper motor control and an I/O subsystem, since we're using a tiny flash chip as backing storage with a flash controller built-in). So you get a SATA interface just like a SATA IDE drive (or an ATA interface like an ATA IDE drive, or a SCSI interface like a SCSI IDE drive), but with a flash back-end. The whole thing takes up... roughly the same space as an SD card anyway.

Re:different from microSD?

[TheThiefMaster]

1: MicroSD only goes up to 32GB, and is actually the limit of MicroSDHC. The standard to go above that (expected to be MicroSDXC, based on SDXC) is yet to exist.
2: The MicroSD interface is limited to 100Mb/s, so the 160Mb/s couldn't be had from MicroSD at all

Other than that, yeah, it's just the same data chip as they probably already had but with a sata device-side chip integrated.

Re:different from microSD?

[gad_zuki!]

You won't get that level of write performance from a microSD card and I also assume this will come with much more sophisticated wear-leveling and TRIM support. There's a reason why manufacturers don't just put 8 microSD cards together and call it an SSD drive.

Re:SATA=solder to motherboard?

[blind biker]

Like the motherboard of the original Eee PC, or the Macbook Air?

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[Bigjeff5]

Furthermore, smaller = faster, smaller = cheaper, and the smaller = denser (that is, more memory in the same package).

Making them smaller accomplishes all your goals, that's why they continue to make them smaller. Saying "don't make them smaller, make them cheaper instead" is like saying "don't add horsepower to my car, just make it go faster"*. Uhh...

Seriously people. The way you make electronics cheaper is by making them smaller. The more chips they can fit on a platter, the cheaper each chip is.

*This is obviously ignoring the minor speed improvements that can be had by reducing weight or removing parasitic losses like the flywheel and AC unit. Changing these invariably changes the purpose of the car (from a comfortable cruiser/street car to an uncomfortable racer) as well, which is assumed to be an undesirable compromise in the analogy.

embedded devices

[OrangeTide]

3. You manufacture a smartphone or smartbook/netbook and want something that is faster than current SD/eMMC solutions and about as cheap.

Flash filesystems are a real pain. The open source ones have some pretty severe limitations (yaffs2), and the commercial ones are expensive and annoying to license (you get locked into them and can't get away). Also, SD/MMC sucks at doing fast reads, while the interface could push 50MB/s most implementations of the interface (not the flash, just the bus itself) can't eek out more than 30MB/s. And managing the flashfile system on the CPU makes doing DMAs almost pointless since you end up using short chunks of data to fit it into NAND's weird topology. The market has shown that device makers really prefer having a smart flash with a small processor to deal with the FTL(flash translation layer, the bit that makes NAND topology into linear logical blocks), this is what SD/MMC/eMMC are (over a medium-speed serial bus).

Processor + MLC NAND flash + a fast bus(SATA for example) is really a winning combination for single-chip flash devices and package-on-package (stacked) devices. Which right now means it is limited to 64GB, but that's hardly a serious limitation. A lot of people are thrilled to have 64GB SSD in their laptops.

If this product is picked up in the big way that I believe it will be, then 96GB-256GB devices would be possible in a stacked configuration.