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Samsung Demos Its First BGA SSD: 1500 MB/s Read Speed and Tiny Package
- revelation 10y agoThat's very few pins for a BGA device, might be something for the hobbyist?
- dogma1138 10y agoIt doesn't need that many pin's it's an SSD on chip, all it needs is power and PCIe pinout.
- ChartsNGraffs 10y agoBGA is typically not for the hobbyist market because they're so hard to solder.
- fit2rule 10y agoI'd love to ship my software on a little SSD like that.
- wfunction 10y agoI really hope your software isn't even remotely this huge to justify it though.
- Razengan 10y agoThat could be a good idea for game consoles, especially handhelds.
- onion2k 10y agoThere are rumours floating about that Nintendo's next game system might go back to game cartridges, which is pretty much exactly "shipping software on a little SSD".
- _wmd 10y agoDo ROMs come this big? SSDs make a shitty long term storage solution as they require continuous write cycles to keep the data alive which causes damage to the flash over time Can't imagine a 512GB ROM would ever be economical given the cost to manufacture and make manufacturing changes to such a beast
- monocasa 10y agoMask ROMs will always be cheaper at scale than Flash.
- jandrese 10y agoHow in the world are you going to get the scale anywhere near the same as the flash market though? I have been wondering about going back to carts. When I see a 64GB Flash Drive for $10 retail I have to think that that the price premium over pressed Blu-Ray disks starts to make sense. You can significantly cut down on loading times, avoid obnoxious installs to the local disk, and have potentially more flexibility in the future to release larger games that don't require multiple disks. Plus, the optical drive is one of if not the most failure prone component on the system (next to only the fan), so eliminating it could cut down considerably on returns and warranty claims.
- monocasa 10y agoWhen I say 'at scale', I really mean ~1000 units. You can already get under your price point with Mask ROMs (and they're faster than flash!).
- jandrese 10y agoThe problem is that your competition isn't Flash Drives at probably $5/per in bulk. It's Blu-Ray disks that cost $0.005/per in bulk. Plus you need to build up a factory to make massive ROMs, since most people doing this are targeting sizes in the handful of KB. You can't even take advantage of competition in the marketplace because your product will be so specialized. Not like the disk pressing houses that are all over China.
- olavgg 10y agoIf these could fit in a 1u chassis on a PCIe slot without a bracket, that would be awesome!
- pjc50 10y agoIt's 16mm x 20mm, you could probably lose it inside a PCIe socket.
- grenoire 10y agoWhat are the very obvious downsides to using these, lifetime or cost?
- aavotins 10y agoIt's BGA, so it's soldered onto the motherboard/logic board. Non user upgradeable, and if the SSD dies, you're in for a costly repair. Another step in the direction of (very) disposable hardware with little to no service options.
- yitchelle 10y agoDoes the other packages give you this ability? The other fine pitch parts are also very difficult to change over.
- Nullabillity 10y agoSATA, PCIe, and M.2 drives are trivial to replace.
- aavotins 10y agoThis is a chip that gets soldered directly on the board. While it is possible to solder this specific chip to a detachable interface that can be removed, I highly doubt anyone will ever do it. This form factor has a huge advantage for OEMs - they can just slap on a single chip that has everything built in - controller, memory management and the actual storage. Less parts = less convoluted assembly process and that is cheaper. While theoretically you can put a BGA fully integrated SSD SOC like this on a PCI-E card or M2 etc., it kinda beats the purpose.
- yitchelle 10y agoPersonally, I think BGA parts are great. They are small and quite robust mechanically an highly integrated (as you have said). I did my early engineering years with DIP parts, the days of when you could just desolder the memory device and place with a higher density device are long gone.
- LeonM 10y agoOne of these in 128Gb (16GiB) might be cheap enough to be stacked below the RAM/CPU combo on the next raspberry Pi. That would significantly increase the performance and reliability of an rPi, I'd love to see that!
- Nullabillity 10y agoI'd hate to see that, one of the big benefits of the RPi is that everything stateful is on the memory card.
- jbverschoor 10y agoYeah, until you actually start using the sdcard. Sd cards and usb sticks corrupt in no time somehow
- haneefmubarak 10y agoPersonally, I've found that external drives only tend to corrupt if you use them as rw boot drives or if you don't unmount and sync them properly (safe remove / eject) on every use. So yeah, the RasPi idea of having using those to boot might corrupt quickly, but if you use them for a camera or just transferring files between computers, you should be safe.
- WatchDog 10y agoWill the 512GB model be on the same size package? That would be pretty dense. I am still waiting for Samsung to release the 1TB version of their 950 Pro, which comes on a much larger M.2 80mm form factor.
- kyrra 10y agoIt's slight, but there are already possible thermal throttling issues with the 512GB 950 Pro[0]. I'm wondering if that becomes more pronounced as they try to pack 1TB onto an m.2 form factor. [0] (search for "thermal" on this page and through the article): http://www.anandtech.com/show/9702/samsung-950-pro-ssd-review-256gb-512gb/3 http://www.anandtech.com/show/9702/samsung-950-pro-ssd-revie...
- WatchDog 10y agoFor my use-case(desktop PC), it shouldnt really matter much. Access would be bursty so it shouldnt really heat up too much, plus there should be adequate ventilation. I mean I probably don’t need the performance of a NVMe SSD at all, but I like to have the best.
- kyrra 10y agohttp://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/solid-state-drives/solid-state-drives-dc-p3608-series.html http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/solid-state-drives/so... May as well go with PCIe cards then. :)
- WatchDog 10y agoWell I have one of these N1 cases[0] which takes a mini-itx board. The graphics card will be taking up the only full size pci-express slot, so I am looking at M.2 ssds. [0] https://www.ncases.com/ https://www.ncases.com/
- sklogic 10y agoCould not find anything on a ball pitch. Can it be suitable for DIY projects?
- metafex 10y agoIf you have an X-Ray to check if the balls are soldered perfectly, then yes. Put it on the board and off with it in the reflow-oven. Keep in mind, it's only 20x16mm. If not, then you're mostly out of luck, but you can try if you manage to source it. And find some datasheets. And have a driver for it. And... On a more serious note: It would be very nice, if it was possible to design a board with components like this, but it is way to hard and needs way too much equipment and experience to do right.
- sklogic 10y agoWell, OSH Park and alike are surprisingly good now, I even had some success recently with an ice40lp WLCS16 package (by pushing well beyond the recommended design constraints), got 1 passable board out of 3. So even a very small ball pitch is somewhat suitable for DIY. What caught my eye in this SSD package is a low ball count, so it might be potentially suitable for DIY even without an expensive hardware. If it's possible to route it on 4 layers without too many small vias it might be a game changer.
- ChartsNGraffs 10y agoLow ball count also means that it is easier for the part to not sit flat when soldered.
- unwind 10y agoI guesstimated it to 0.83 mm from the single image in the article. That's not very small by BGA standards, as far as I know. On the other hand, 1,500 MB/s data and PCIe are quite serious levels of performance by most DIY project standards. :)
- sklogic 10y ago
- sambe 10y agoPeople are saying it being soldered down is a big disadvantage but I'm not following. The article says that M.2 spec will be available with PCIe or SATA interfaces and there is a photo of a Toshiba version on what looks like a small PCIe card. Aren't these the same as buying an existing card-based SSD? If not, what is the relationship between all these interface types? Are they intended to be soldered onto the motherboard?
- LeonM 10y agoIt mostly applies for laptops and other portable devices. Manufacturers may decide to solder the SSD directly to the motherboard, like Apple currently does with RAM on their laptop computers. This is beneficial to the manufacturer because it's more compact, less chance of mechanical failure, easier to assemble (pick&place instead of humans), lower price etc. In short: it's very attractive for manufacturers. For consumers this is worrying though, as with the RAM on Apple laptops: - You cannot replace a failed SSD, you need to replace the entire motherboard - You cannot upgrade the SSD, so you have to accept the ridiculous price stepup when ordering the laptop (i.e. the 200 dollar price bump to get 8GB extra RAM on a macbook pro) - Laptop is less valuable when trying to sell it on after a couple of years, because the storage size will be low compared to new SSD's.
- dexterdog 10y agoDoesn't Apple do it currently with their SSDs as well?
- yoz-y 10y agoIs there a reason to not put this into smartphones?
- thesehands 10y agoI suspect data carriers would prefer you spend your dollars streaming rather than consuming stored media on the handset.
- yoz-y 10y agoHehe, that might well be but I wonder. At least in France I suspect that carriers would rather people did not use all of their allocated BW (you can get 50GB on LTE for 20 Euros per month).
- imtringued 10y agoI pay the same for 1% of the capacity.
- merpnderp 10y agoIn rural US I pay 45 Euros for 30GB/month. In the city I get about 1mb/s, but in the countryside I can get 40mb/s.
- haneefmubarak 10y agoDo you mean $45 or ~$50 (45 euros)? Also, which cellular provider here in the states is offering 30 GB / month at that low of a price (do they have special rural pricing or something)?
- icpmacdo 10y agoI'm crying, I pay the same of 1/100th the data in Canada
- usefulcat 10y agoI doubt that. Less streaming per customer means they can support more customers with a given amount of infrastructure (I'm thinking about towers and spectrum in particular), so their infrastructure costs effectively go down on a per-customer basis.
- nl 10y agoI have just built a PC with a M.2 Samsung 950 Pro on a Z170 motherboard (make sure you get the Z170 so the M.2 slot can use 4 PCI-E channels). The performance of this thing is insane. Ars benchmarked it at 2600MB/s read, 1500MB/s write for sequential data[1]. Most SSDs benchmark at less than 600 MB/s[2]. By comparison, a RAM Disk gets ~6000MB/s on the https://hardforum.com/threads/quad-channel-ram-disk-benchmark-with-crstal-diskmark.1842437/same https://hardforum.com/threads/quad-channel-ram-disk-benchmar... benchmark. [1] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/10/950-pro-review-samsungs-first-pcie-m-2-nvme-ssd-is-an-absolute-monster/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/10/950-pro-review-samsun... [2] http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/samsung-850-evo-ssd-review,13.html http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/samsung-850-evo-ssd-rev... [3] https://hardforum.com/threads/quad-channel-ram-disk-benchmark-with-crstal-diskmark.1842437/ https://hardforum.com/threads/quad-channel-ram-disk-benchmar...
- olavgg 10y agoHow many iops do you get when you test it with fio (http://linux.die.net/man/1/fio http://linux.die.net/man/1/fio) ? Example: sudo fio --filename=/home/olav/testfile --direct=1 --sync=1 --rw=read --bs=4k --numjobs=8 --iodepth=32 --runtime=60 --time_based --group_reporting --size=1G --name=journal-test
- nl 10y agoNot in-front of it now. Will try to remember to do this though.
- ElijahLynn 10y agoPlease do this, the IOPS are very important!
- Qiasfah 10y agoAnandtech's results may be applicable here too: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9702/samsung-950-pro-ssd-review-256gb-512gb/3 http://www.anandtech.com/show/9702/samsung-950-pro-ssd-revie...
- 10y ago
- Certified 10y agoI used to repair seismic nodes as part of my job. BGAs had the highest failure rate in high shock and temperature cycling environments by far. I find it worrying that so many chips are being designed with BGA. All it takes is one ball disconnect and you have a useless device without an expensive solder reflow. It seems like a really good way to design a device to have to be replaced after 5-10 years...
- semi-extrinsic 10y agoIf MTBF is 5-10 years, that's comparable to existing HDDs/SSDs, no?
- bravo22 10y agoBGAs can be underfilled [1] to greatly increase mechanical reliability and shock resistance. 1. http://m.eet.com/media/1122054/0112esdnexlogic02.png http://m.eet.com/media/1122054/0112esdnexlogic02.png
- Certified 10y agoI have not knowingly seen this used in the wild but it looks intriguing. I've seen a lot of conformal coatings used to increase shock resistance but from my experience that is only half the battle. The thermal expansion and contraction can be the real slow silent killer. The caveat being that I was dealing with devices rated (and used) from -30°C to 85°C.
- bravo22 10y agoIt gets used quiet often, even Nest uses it [1]. Obviously proper heat management is important. 1. https://cdn.sparkfun.com/assets/8/5/c/7/4/52e157adce395f47598b4567.jpg https://cdn.sparkfun.com/assets/8/5/c/7/4/52e157adce395f4759...
- akavel 10y agoAnybody can explain what are "seismic nodes"? I tried googling it, as well as "repair seismic nodes", but to no apparent success