12 ms·

Toshiba Introduces New Tiny NVMe SSD Form Factor

271 points by discreditable 7y ago

sdlion 7y ago
I worry about the spring force of those pins after so many extreme temperature changes. Or AMD spring connectors design are similar to these? EDIT: I meant "Intel spring pin connectors"
- rhinoceraptor 7y ago
  It seems like it's basically like CPU socket spring pins, which I would assume have much higher thermal loading.
  - sdlion 7y ago
    by just pictures Intel spring pins are shorter and broader on the base side and with a steep rising angle. These look (quite) longer and with a lower rising angle. I guess these pins are more feeble and imprint less force than CPU spring pins.
- mhb 7y ago
  You're talking about heat cycling? What affect does that have on a spring? Are the temperatures here even extreme for a piece of metal?
djsumdog 7y ago
Wonder if we'll see these on the Raspberry Pi 5 and other embedded boards? This is pretty amazing; much better than the current eMMC and SDCard based storage solutions on a lot of dev boards.
- shawnz 7y ago
  Is it better than SD Express though, which also supports PCIe and is backwards compatible with existing cards?
  - throwaway542134 7y ago
    I don't think the connector is the problem but the devices you connect to. RPis are notorious for having a poor lifespan due to reading/writing from the SD cards, but I think that's mostly due to the cost tier of a $30 computer.
    - bayindirh 7y ago
      I'm running a batch of SBCs which boot from SD cards as home or forgettable servers. None of them died due to SD card failure yet. A good SD card with a little optimization keeps the flash media wear out at bay.
      - bobwaycott 7y ago
        What little optimizations?
        bayindirh 7y ago
        Like writing logs to RAM and syncing back to disk daily or only on reboots/shutdowns, keeping high-write applications on a USB drive and providing the biggest cache possible by slimming down the OS memory footprint. This two things reduce the hits to SD card substantially.
    - solarkraft 7y ago
      > RPis are notorious for having a poor lifespan due to reading/writing from the SD cards How does the Raspberry Pi deteriorate from the interaction with the SD card?
    - imtringued 7y ago
      It has more to do with the garbage $2 power supply someone had "lying around".
  - wtallis 7y ago
    This doesn't seem to be targeted at the frequently-swapped use cases that SD cards are made for. It's more about adding repairability/upgradability to internal primary storage in small devices. For that use case, the 4x throughput advantage is probably reason enough to rule out SD Express.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
  Please correct me if I’m wrong but no RaspPi has a PCIe interface, yet. From the embedded side of things, I would expect that to be a whole Pi generation out. Even then, I’m honestly not sure what the use case is, the Pi is doing amazing things with SPI and USB.
  - shawnz 7y ago
    The RPi 4 uses PCIe to interface with the USB 3 controller. However it doesn't provide an external interface for it.
    - matthewmacleod 7y ago
      You can, of course, hack your own together :) http://mloduchowski.com/en/blog/raspberry-pi-4-b-pci-express/ http://mloduchowski.com/en/blog/raspberry-pi-4-b-pci-express...
  - pritambaral 7y ago
    The USB 3.0 controller on the Pi 4 is connected via PCIe. https://blog.hackster.io/meet-the-new-raspberry-pi-4-model-b-9b4698c284 https://blog.hackster.io/meet-the-new-raspberry-pi-4-model-b...
- gambiting 7y ago
  RockPi has a full size M.2 connector that accepts most NVMe drives: http://rockpi.org/ http://rockpi.org/
  - chaoticmass 7y ago
    I bought one of these for fun, with the whole kit, NVMe drive and a nice aluminum case... not sure what I am going to do with it but it's a really nice little PC and amazing what it can do.
  - tristor 7y ago
    I bought a Rock Pi 4 and the whole kit-n-kaboodle. Just finished doing some benchmarking and it has pretty impressive performance, but it definitely needs assistance staying cool. The case I have is aluminum with the bottom of the case being a whole-board heatsink, and I still had to set it on top of ice packs with a fan blowing to keep it from throttling under heavy benchmarking load. I think one thing people don't think about with SBCs is that we are making pretty significant thermal performance trade-offs. I wish somebody made a case with a clean flow through and at least 1 120mm fan in it.
    - mceachen 7y ago
      Or... you could make your own Extra Fancy case: https://twitter.com/mrm/status/1157820493098934272 https://twitter.com/mrm/status/1157820493098934272
  - hipboi 7y ago
    Ongoing work on the reverse-engineered Panfrost OpenGL ES driver for Arm Mali GPUs has turned the RK3399 SoC into a very attractive platform to try out Wayland on ARM devices. https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2019/08/06/rockpi-panfrost-wayland/ https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2019/08/06/rock...
- myself248 7y ago
  Hardkernel saw this need and addressed it; their boards use an eMMC daughterboard with a standardized connector that I could swear I've seen picked up by a few other vendors now. I wonder if they'll switch over to this on some future generation.
- 95014_refugee 7y ago
  Never happening on something in the RPi price range; that socket will be far too expensive.
amluto 7y ago
I would love a Raspberry Pi-like device with one of these sockets.
SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
We’ve come full circle back to primary storage that drops into a socket. All things considered, that’s not a bad looking socket system. With thermal limitation the issue, it seems BGA+heat sink will still outperform but at the cost of not being upgradable. Still, seems like a fair idea to have a PCIe4 MicroSD.
- kaoD 7y ago
  > We’ve come full circle back to primary storage that drops into a socket. What are you referring to?
  - theobeers 7y ago
    Presumably the days when socketed memory was primary storage for PCs.
  - hawski 7y ago
    A cassette of course :) https://youtu.be/BnHW-f5ayhs?t=108 https://youtu.be/BnHW-f5ayhs?t=108
thinkmassive 7y ago
Cool! I read the announcement and visited the product page[1], but I didn't see any indication of when this will start to be available. Anyone have any clues? 1: https://business.toshiba-memory.com/en-jp/product/memory/xfmexpress.html https://business.toshiba-memory.com/en-jp/product/memory/xfm...
raintrees 7y ago
No mention of starting capacities...
- wtallis 7y ago
  They're only announcing the form factor today, not a final product. But we should see at least 512GB, and probably 1TB. Their current 1TB BGA SSD is a bit thicker than XFMEXPRESS.
tracker1 7y ago
Definitely nice for SFF... but I don't think that higher performing devices will be able to dissipate enough heat from the lid alone. Most PCIe gen 4 SSDs have relatively large heat spreaders because of the load. Similarly, I keep thinking it would be cool to have a GPU socket format that could sit adjacent to the CPU so that a large heat pipe / cooler could be attached to both.
- mrguyorama 7y ago
  >I keep thinking it would be cool to have a GPU socket format that could sit adjacent to the CPU so that a large heat pipe / cooler could be attached to both. That's pretty much exactly how modern high end laptops with dedicated graphics processors work
- discreditable 7y ago
  That bracket reminds me a lot of a CPU bracket. It's not hard to imagine a hole in the top so you could mount a heatsink with direct contact to the card.
cosmotic 7y ago
The angle of insertion seems like a total deal breaker for any sort of embedded device.
- umvi 7y ago
  I mean, you could create a different housing for an embedded device like a cell phone that receives the same card. I remember when SIM cards used to go in at an angle and flip down like in the diagram, but now all the housings are just slide-in with spring loaded contacts.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    Back when cell phones had removable batteries you'd just put a connector like this under the battery. These days it seems like a fairly major oversight. Maybe someone will figure out a slide in socket that will be compatible? Depends on how the pins are arranged on the memory card. It might be tricky to pull off depending on the pinout of the card.
  - dmix 7y ago
    Is that considered 'non-standard' or is the connector part and an enclosing case all that matters?
gambiting 7y ago
How is this an "innovative connector design"? This is exactly how sim card slots worked on many old Nokias, the mechanism is literally identical.
- trilila 7y ago
  Innovation doesn't equal inventing new stuff. I think it is quite innovative how they use an old mechanism for a new use case.
  - close04 7y ago
    It's not a new use case, it's still used to connect a card to a board. Just like the hinged connector used for microSD before this [0]. It's more USB 3.0 type A connector vs. the USB 2.0 type A. Neither the connector itself nor the application are innovative. Which is why nobody is pointing out the particular innovation in the connector. [0] https://www.yamaichi.de/products/connector-solutions/card-connectors/micro-sd-card-connector/micro-sd-card-connector-hinge-type.html https://www.yamaichi.de/products/connector-solutions/card-co...
    - danaris 7y ago
      Using it for a smaller NVMe SSD, however, is. Quite clearly. You can call just about anything "not innovative" if you're sufficiently reductionist about it. The idea that the only "true" innovation is some totally unknown, totally revolutionary idea that came completely out of nowhere fully formed is a toxic one that robs people and companies of just praise for coming up with interesting and useful new things, while others get lauded for making a whizbang concept prototype that's never going to be commercially viable. This is something no one has done before, even if many of the parts have been done in different ways. That's innovation.
      - close04 7y ago
        Toshiba calls it an "innovative connector design" referring explicitly to the connector itself. You don't have to be a "reductionist" to see that it's not really that innovative. MicroSD cards have been using the hinged connector for years [0]. Now the fact that they connect this type of card instead of the other type of card is indeed new. I appreciate them improving on the current situation and I love that I'll get SSD performance with SD convenience but it doesn't have to be innovative for me to do that. [0] https://www.yamaichi.de/products/connector-solutions/card-connectors/micro-sd-card-connector/micro-sd-card-connector-hinge-type.html https://www.yamaichi.de/products/connector-solutions/card-co...
rolltiide 7y ago
when all else fails, add another row of connectors!
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
I can definitely see the perks of the form factor here, and totally see SSD cooling hardware as being the next big thing, and it sounds like they're prepared for that here. But I mourn how fast the interface format is changing now, because I don't have the hardware to support all of these formats. I've got a handy USB to SATA adapter that did the job for, I don't know, a decade and a half, and now there's eight different types of SSD sockets out there.
- Tepix 7y ago
  Just get a new USB 3 adapter. Here's one for M.2 for 5 bucks https://s.click.aliexpress.com/e/bq4e19rS https://s.click.aliexpress.com/e/bq4e19rS
- Svperstar 7y ago
  Its crazy my 2.5" SSD died last week and I opted to go from 2 different SSDs to 1 2 tb nvme SSD. I too have a USB to Sata adapter but now I can't use it on my personal computer. I do have a thunderbolt external nvme adapter they have got a lot cheaper.
  - peterburkimsher 7y ago
    Is the Thunderbolt adaptor you're using the same as my Transcend JetDrive 855? I successfully tested it with an Intel 660P 2 TB into an M.2 to Mac adaptor.
- ricardobeat 7y ago
  SATA, M2, now this. What other interfaces are there?
  - Rebelgecko 7y ago
    Less common and I might be mangling terminology , but there's also PCIe, PCIe-Mini, mSATA, SATA Express (same connector as SATA). There's also a variety of m.2 form factors
    - 7y ago
altmind 7y ago
How it is comparable to microSD express(with pci-e 3.1 and nvme) announced February this year? https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/286390-sd-association-announces-microsd-express-with-pcie-nvme-support https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/286390-sd-association-ann...
- znpy 7y ago
  thanks for asking the real questions
- nimish 7y ago
  SD Express is almost certainly going to be adopted by more people than Toshiba, for one. Though it could die like UHS-III.
djhworld 7y ago
Last week I purchased an NVMe drive for a small home server I'm building. Take into consideration the last time I bought components was about 6 years ago so it absolutely blew my mind seeing how small the NVMe drive was, like the size of a chocolate bar and barely more than 1mm tall. I took photos of it in the palm of my hand! Seeing they're looking into shrinking these things even further is even more incredible to me!
dev_dull 7y ago
Love the form factor and I hope to see something like this in raspberry pi devices.
pathartl 7y ago
Something that I think people are glancing over, this has some huge potential in the laptop / pro tablet space. I don't think someone like Apple would ever move to something like this, but standard NVMe mounting solutions are probably taller than they need to be. This is also a screwless solution which while not a huge deal, is pretty neat. In my eyes, this sort of connector gives manufacturers no reason to solder on storage. There's the cooling issue, but looking at something like the MacBook I could see it integrated into the CPU block or even the bottom case. Hell, if they did the bottom case it might even give some support to the logic board and they won't have as many issues with the board flexing. No rubber pads needed!
- bufferoverflow 7y ago
  Who cares about laptops and tablets? They already have fast ports. You already can put a real NVMe drive into a USB enclosure and get ridiculously fast external storage. This new form factor would be perfect for cameras that shoot RAW video or high-bandwidth video. Until recently you'd need to buy very expensive and fast SD cards or proprietary RED mags to be able to record high quality high resolution video. BMPCC4K was the first (very affordable) camera that allowed recording directly into a USB SSD.
  - pathartl 7y ago
    Seeing as how most premium laptops today are using some sort of PCI-E storage... I would say professionals that are using their laptops as workstations care. This isn't an interconnect made for external use per se, but for replaceable storage. In the article it specifically is mentioned as a replacement for soldered BGA storage. The way the mechanism works (which is very similar to old full size SIM card slots on old feature phones) is meant to act as a more permanent socket than something like a spring loaded SD card slot or USB port. It's more akin to a CPU socket. For laptops and tablets this could be a huge move, partially because of the user-serviceable upgrade potential, but also because of data recovery. Instead of the flash chips and their controller being on the same board as the CPU, GPU, muxes, power management systems, etc, they can now fit in a secure, low profile and low footprint socket. Take newer MacBook Pros for instance. They have soldered on storage and no way to access that data if the logic board dies. Previously, Apple had outfit the board with a "lifeboat" connector that allows for data transfer from the soldered on storage (assuming it's still intact) without having a fully working board. Louis Rossmann, of course, went over this in a video just a couple days ago. He had a customer that sent a machine in that is a few-months-old MacBook Pro 13". It has a dead T2 chip which renders the entire logic board useless. There is no way (short of desoldering the flash chips and possibly putting it on a working donor board, but then you run into a whole slew of other issues) to recover data off of that machine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi9en4I-tjA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi9en4I-tjA
devonkim 7y ago
Maybe I’m too much of a sysadmin but this looks like they’re trying to make a successor to the SATA DOM form factor that also works for embedded use cases.
ilaksh 7y ago
Seems like a good thing for mini-PCs and laptops. I am really into mini-PCs. Like the Mini-STX DeskMini GTX/RX is my favorite thing at the moment even though I don't really need it. It uses MXM (laptop) graphics cards such as even a 1080. I am wondering, with an external power brick like the DeskMini GTX/RX uses, could you make the systems even smaller than Mini-STX? Maybe there could be a way to separate out the components package from a cooling solution that would be attached. I like the combination of portability, easily plug-able components, and power.
GrryDucape 7y ago
Not sure if this will end up in consumer devices but it would be a hell of a lot better than SSD chips soldered onto laptop motherboards. The latest ultraportables all seem to have soldered SSDs because once Apple did it and the world kept spinning, that made it okay for Dell and everyone else to follow suit. Of course the SSDs themselves would have to become easily available for people to upgrade their laptops or it will just be the next MXM standard, upgradeable in theory but no one actually does it.

271 points by discreditable 7y ago

I worry about the spring force of those pins after so many extreme temperature changes. Or AMD spring connectors design are similar to these? EDIT: I meant "Intel spring pin connectors"

rhinoceraptor 7y ago
It seems like it's basically like CPU socket spring pins, which I would assume have much higher thermal loading.
- sdlion 7y ago
  by just pictures Intel spring pins are shorter and broader on the base side and with a steep rising angle. These look (quite) longer and with a lower rising angle. I guess these pins are more feeble and imprint less force than CPU spring pins.
mhb 7y ago
You're talking about heat cycling? What affect does that have on a spring? Are the temperatures here even extreme for a piece of metal?

djsumdog 7y ago

Wonder if we'll see these on the Raspberry Pi 5 and other embedded boards? This is pretty amazing; much better than the current eMMC and SDCard based storage solutions on a lot of dev boards.

shawnz 7y ago
Is it better than SD Express though, which also supports PCIe and is backwards compatible with existing cards?
- throwaway542134 7y ago
  I don't think the connector is the problem but the devices you connect to. RPis are notorious for having a poor lifespan due to reading/writing from the SD cards, but I think that's mostly due to the cost tier of a $30 computer.
  - bayindirh 7y ago
    I'm running a batch of SBCs which boot from SD cards as home or forgettable servers. None of them died due to SD card failure yet. A good SD card with a little optimization keeps the flash media wear out at bay.
    - bobwaycott 7y ago
      What little optimizations?
      - bayindirh 7y ago
        Like writing logs to RAM and syncing back to disk daily or only on reboots/shutdowns, keeping high-write applications on a USB drive and providing the biggest cache possible by slimming down the OS memory footprint. This two things reduce the hits to SD card substantially.
  - solarkraft 7y ago
    > RPis are notorious for having a poor lifespan due to reading/writing from the SD cards How does the Raspberry Pi deteriorate from the interaction with the SD card?
  - imtringued 7y ago
    It has more to do with the garbage $2 power supply someone had "lying around".
- wtallis 7y ago
  This doesn't seem to be targeted at the frequently-swapped use cases that SD cards are made for. It's more about adding repairability/upgradability to internal primary storage in small devices. For that use case, the 4x throughput advantage is probably reason enough to rule out SD Express.
SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
Please correct me if I’m wrong but no RaspPi has a PCIe interface, yet. From the embedded side of things, I would expect that to be a whole Pi generation out. Even then, I’m honestly not sure what the use case is, the Pi is doing amazing things with SPI and USB.
- shawnz 7y ago
  The RPi 4 uses PCIe to interface with the USB 3 controller. However it doesn't provide an external interface for it.
  - matthewmacleod 7y ago
    You can, of course, hack your own together :) http://mloduchowski.com/en/blog/raspberry-pi-4-b-pci-express/ http://mloduchowski.com/en/blog/raspberry-pi-4-b-pci-express...
- pritambaral 7y ago
  The USB 3.0 controller on the Pi 4 is connected via PCIe. https://blog.hackster.io/meet-the-new-raspberry-pi-4-model-b-9b4698c284 https://blog.hackster.io/meet-the-new-raspberry-pi-4-model-b...
gambiting 7y ago
RockPi has a full size M.2 connector that accepts most NVMe drives: http://rockpi.org/ http://rockpi.org/
- chaoticmass 7y ago
  I bought one of these for fun, with the whole kit, NVMe drive and a nice aluminum case... not sure what I am going to do with it but it's a really nice little PC and amazing what it can do.
- tristor 7y ago
  I bought a Rock Pi 4 and the whole kit-n-kaboodle. Just finished doing some benchmarking and it has pretty impressive performance, but it definitely needs assistance staying cool. The case I have is aluminum with the bottom of the case being a whole-board heatsink, and I still had to set it on top of ice packs with a fan blowing to keep it from throttling under heavy benchmarking load. I think one thing people don't think about with SBCs is that we are making pretty significant thermal performance trade-offs. I wish somebody made a case with a clean flow through and at least 1 120mm fan in it.
  - mceachen 7y ago
    Or... you could make your own Extra Fancy case: https://twitter.com/mrm/status/1157820493098934272 https://twitter.com/mrm/status/1157820493098934272
- hipboi 7y ago
  Ongoing work on the reverse-engineered Panfrost OpenGL ES driver for Arm Mali GPUs has turned the RK3399 SoC into a very attractive platform to try out Wayland on ARM devices. https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2019/08/06/rockpi-panfrost-wayland/ https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2019/08/06/rock...
myself248 7y ago
Hardkernel saw this need and addressed it; their boards use an eMMC daughterboard with a standardized connector that I could swear I've seen picked up by a few other vendors now. I wonder if they'll switch over to this on some future generation.
95014_refugee 7y ago
Never happening on something in the RPi price range; that socket will be far too expensive.

amluto 7y ago

I would love a Raspberry Pi-like device with one of these sockets.

SlowRobotAhead 7y ago

We’ve come full circle back to primary storage that drops into a socket. All things considered, that’s not a bad looking socket system. With thermal limitation the issue, it seems BGA+heat sink will still outperform but at the cost of not being upgradable. Still, seems like a fair idea to have a PCIe4 MicroSD.

kaoD 7y ago
> We’ve come full circle back to primary storage that drops into a socket. What are you referring to?
- theobeers 7y ago
  Presumably the days when socketed memory was primary storage for PCs.
- hawski 7y ago
  A cassette of course :) https://youtu.be/BnHW-f5ayhs?t=108 https://youtu.be/BnHW-f5ayhs?t=108

thinkmassive 7y ago

Cool! I read the announcement and visited the product page[1], but I didn't see any indication of when this will start to be available. Anyone have any clues? 1: https://business.toshiba-memory.com/en-jp/product/memory/xfmexpress.html https://business.toshiba-memory.com/en-jp/product/memory/xfm...

raintrees 7y ago

No mention of starting capacities...

wtallis 7y ago
They're only announcing the form factor today, not a final product. But we should see at least 512GB, and probably 1TB. Their current 1TB BGA SSD is a bit thicker than XFMEXPRESS.

tracker1 7y ago

Definitely nice for SFF... but I don't think that higher performing devices will be able to dissipate enough heat from the lid alone. Most PCIe gen 4 SSDs have relatively large heat spreaders because of the load. Similarly, I keep thinking it would be cool to have a GPU socket format that could sit adjacent to the CPU so that a large heat pipe / cooler could be attached to both.

mrguyorama 7y ago
>I keep thinking it would be cool to have a GPU socket format that could sit adjacent to the CPU so that a large heat pipe / cooler could be attached to both. That's pretty much exactly how modern high end laptops with dedicated graphics processors work
discreditable 7y ago
That bracket reminds me a lot of a CPU bracket. It's not hard to imagine a hole in the top so you could mount a heatsink with direct contact to the card.

cosmotic 7y ago

The angle of insertion seems like a total deal breaker for any sort of embedded device.

umvi 7y ago
I mean, you could create a different housing for an embedded device like a cell phone that receives the same card. I remember when SIM cards used to go in at an angle and flip down like in the diagram, but now all the housings are just slide-in with spring loaded contacts.
- jandrese 7y ago
  Back when cell phones had removable batteries you'd just put a connector like this under the battery. These days it seems like a fairly major oversight. Maybe someone will figure out a slide in socket that will be compatible? Depends on how the pins are arranged on the memory card. It might be tricky to pull off depending on the pinout of the card.
- dmix 7y ago
  Is that considered 'non-standard' or is the connector part and an enclosing case all that matters?

gambiting 7y ago

How is this an "innovative connector design"? This is exactly how sim card slots worked on many old Nokias, the mechanism is literally identical.

trilila 7y ago
Innovation doesn't equal inventing new stuff. I think it is quite innovative how they use an old mechanism for a new use case.
- close04 7y ago
  It's not a new use case, it's still used to connect a card to a board. Just like the hinged connector used for microSD before this [0]. It's more USB 3.0 type A connector vs. the USB 2.0 type A. Neither the connector itself nor the application are innovative. Which is why nobody is pointing out the particular innovation in the connector. [0] https://www.yamaichi.de/products/connector-solutions/card-connectors/micro-sd-card-connector/micro-sd-card-connector-hinge-type.html https://www.yamaichi.de/products/connector-solutions/card-co...
  - danaris 7y ago
    Using it for a smaller NVMe SSD, however, is. Quite clearly. You can call just about anything "not innovative" if you're sufficiently reductionist about it. The idea that the only "true" innovation is some totally unknown, totally revolutionary idea that came completely out of nowhere fully formed is a toxic one that robs people and companies of just praise for coming up with interesting and useful new things, while others get lauded for making a whizbang concept prototype that's never going to be commercially viable. This is something no one has done before, even if many of the parts have been done in different ways. That's innovation.
    - close04 7y ago
      Toshiba calls it an "innovative connector design" referring explicitly to the connector itself. You don't have to be a "reductionist" to see that it's not really that innovative. MicroSD cards have been using the hinged connector for years [0]. Now the fact that they connect this type of card instead of the other type of card is indeed new. I appreciate them improving on the current situation and I love that I'll get SSD performance with SD convenience but it doesn't have to be innovative for me to do that. [0] https://www.yamaichi.de/products/connector-solutions/card-connectors/micro-sd-card-connector/micro-sd-card-connector-hinge-type.html https://www.yamaichi.de/products/connector-solutions/card-co...

rolltiide 7y ago

when all else fails, add another row of connectors!

ocdtrekkie 7y ago

I can definitely see the perks of the form factor here, and totally see SSD cooling hardware as being the next big thing, and it sounds like they're prepared for that here. But I mourn how fast the interface format is changing now, because I don't have the hardware to support all of these formats. I've got a handy USB to SATA adapter that did the job for, I don't know, a decade and a half, and now there's eight different types of SSD sockets out there.

Tepix 7y ago
Just get a new USB 3 adapter. Here's one for M.2 for 5 bucks https://s.click.aliexpress.com/e/bq4e19rS https://s.click.aliexpress.com/e/bq4e19rS
Svperstar 7y ago
Its crazy my 2.5" SSD died last week and I opted to go from 2 different SSDs to 1 2 tb nvme SSD. I too have a USB to Sata adapter but now I can't use it on my personal computer. I do have a thunderbolt external nvme adapter they have got a lot cheaper.
- peterburkimsher 7y ago
  Is the Thunderbolt adaptor you're using the same as my Transcend JetDrive 855? I successfully tested it with an Intel 660P 2 TB into an M.2 to Mac adaptor.
ricardobeat 7y ago
SATA, M2, now this. What other interfaces are there?
- Rebelgecko 7y ago
  Less common and I might be mangling terminology , but there's also PCIe, PCIe-Mini, mSATA, SATA Express (same connector as SATA). There's also a variety of m.2 form factors
  - 7y ago

altmind 7y ago

How it is comparable to microSD express(with pci-e 3.1 and nvme) announced February this year? https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/286390-sd-association-announces-microsd-express-with-pcie-nvme-support https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/286390-sd-association-ann...

znpy 7y ago
thanks for asking the real questions
nimish 7y ago
SD Express is almost certainly going to be adopted by more people than Toshiba, for one. Though it could die like UHS-III.

djhworld 7y ago

Last week I purchased an NVMe drive for a small home server I'm building. Take into consideration the last time I bought components was about 6 years ago so it absolutely blew my mind seeing how small the NVMe drive was, like the size of a chocolate bar and barely more than 1mm tall. I took photos of it in the palm of my hand! Seeing they're looking into shrinking these things even further is even more incredible to me!

dev_dull 7y ago

Love the form factor and I hope to see something like this in raspberry pi devices.

pathartl 7y ago

Something that I think people are glancing over, this has some huge potential in the laptop / pro tablet space. I don't think someone like Apple would ever move to something like this, but standard NVMe mounting solutions are probably taller than they need to be. This is also a screwless solution which while not a huge deal, is pretty neat. In my eyes, this sort of connector gives manufacturers no reason to solder on storage. There's the cooling issue, but looking at something like the MacBook I could see it integrated into the CPU block or even the bottom case. Hell, if they did the bottom case it might even give some support to the logic board and they won't have as many issues with the board flexing. No rubber pads needed!

bufferoverflow 7y ago
Who cares about laptops and tablets? They already have fast ports. You already can put a real NVMe drive into a USB enclosure and get ridiculously fast external storage. This new form factor would be perfect for cameras that shoot RAW video or high-bandwidth video. Until recently you'd need to buy very expensive and fast SD cards or proprietary RED mags to be able to record high quality high resolution video. BMPCC4K was the first (very affordable) camera that allowed recording directly into a USB SSD.
- pathartl 7y ago
  Seeing as how most premium laptops today are using some sort of PCI-E storage... I would say professionals that are using their laptops as workstations care. This isn't an interconnect made for external use per se, but for replaceable storage. In the article it specifically is mentioned as a replacement for soldered BGA storage. The way the mechanism works (which is very similar to old full size SIM card slots on old feature phones) is meant to act as a more permanent socket than something like a spring loaded SD card slot or USB port. It's more akin to a CPU socket. For laptops and tablets this could be a huge move, partially because of the user-serviceable upgrade potential, but also because of data recovery. Instead of the flash chips and their controller being on the same board as the CPU, GPU, muxes, power management systems, etc, they can now fit in a secure, low profile and low footprint socket. Take newer MacBook Pros for instance. They have soldered on storage and no way to access that data if the logic board dies. Previously, Apple had outfit the board with a "lifeboat" connector that allows for data transfer from the soldered on storage (assuming it's still intact) without having a fully working board. Louis Rossmann, of course, went over this in a video just a couple days ago. He had a customer that sent a machine in that is a few-months-old MacBook Pro 13". It has a dead T2 chip which renders the entire logic board useless. There is no way (short of desoldering the flash chips and possibly putting it on a working donor board, but then you run into a whole slew of other issues) to recover data off of that machine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi9en4I-tjA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi9en4I-tjA

devonkim 7y ago

Maybe I’m too much of a sysadmin but this looks like they’re trying to make a successor to the SATA DOM form factor that also works for embedded use cases.

ilaksh 7y ago

Seems like a good thing for mini-PCs and laptops. I am really into mini-PCs. Like the Mini-STX DeskMini GTX/RX is my favorite thing at the moment even though I don't really need it. It uses MXM (laptop) graphics cards such as even a 1080. I am wondering, with an external power brick like the DeskMini GTX/RX uses, could you make the systems even smaller than Mini-STX? Maybe there could be a way to separate out the components package from a cooling solution that would be attached. I like the combination of portability, easily plug-able components, and power.

GrryDucape 7y ago

Not sure if this will end up in consumer devices but it would be a hell of a lot better than SSD chips soldered onto laptop motherboards. The latest ultraportables all seem to have soldered SSDs because once Apple did it and the world kept spinning, that made it okay for Dell and everyone else to follow suit. Of course the SSDs themselves would have to become easily available for people to upgrade their laptops or it will just be the next MXM standard, upgradeable in theory but no one actually does it.