Today at CES 2019 in Las Vegas, Toshiba Memory America Inc. introduced its fourth generation ball grid array (BGA) SSD product line, the BG4 series. The BG4 is the company’s first 96-Layer BGA SSD. The tiny BG4 leverages NVMe interface and puts the storage and controller into a single package making it ideal for mobile devices or sever boots where space is limited.
Today at CES 2019 in Las Vegas, Toshiba Memory America Inc. introduced its fourth generation ball grid array (BGA) SSD product line, the BG4 series. The BG4 is the company’s first 96-Layer BGA SSD. The tiny BG4 leverages NVMe interface and puts the storage and controller into a single package making it ideal for mobile devices or sever boots where space is limited.
While HDDs are all about cramming more and more capacity in the same form factor, SSDs are looking to make themselves smaller with higher capacity and better performance. Toshiba was the first company to come out with a single package PCIe SSD and the BG4 is another example of innovation. The BG4 can leverage Toshiba’s 96-layer BiCS FLASH 3D memory to hit 1,024GB of capacity in a single package. Not only is this double the capacity of the previous version, it is also 0.2mm thinner than the previous generation’s. Toshiba was also able to double the PCIe Gen3 lane count to 4 to squeeze even more performance out of the same form factor. The company claims the new drive can hit 2.25GB/s sequential read, 1.7GB/s sequential write, 380K IOPS random read, and 190K IOPS random write.
Further improvements over the previous generation, the BG3, including power efficiency up to 20% in reads and 7% in writes as well as the addition of a lower-power state, as low as 5mW. Toshiba improved its Host Memory Buffer (HMB) technology in the BG4 by increasing the accelerated read access range and optimizing background flash management. And the BG4 has new reliability features that help protect against host DRAM failures.
The BG4 will be available in 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1024GB (1TB) capacities as either surface- mount BGA M.2 1620 (16 x 20mm) or removable M.2 2230 (22 x 30mm) modules.
Availability
The Toshiba BG4 Series is currently sampling with select OEM customers with general availability expected later this year. The BG4 Series is being showcased at Toshiba’s private demo suite at the Venetian during CES.
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