Samsung announces 512GB NVMe SSD weighing only 1 gram with read and write speeds of 1500MB/s and 900MB/s, available starting in June
Samsung today announced that mass production has begun on a new NVMe PCIe solid state drive in a ball grid array package, the first of its kind to be available in large quantities.
Context & Ripple Effects
Samsung's NVMe push has been building since early 2015, when it showed a PCIe SSD prototype hitting 2.15GB/s on two milliwatts of standby power, and matured with the consumer-oriented 950 Pro built on V-NAND and NVMe that fall. What changes today is packaging and volume: the same NVMe protocol now ships in a ball grid array — a chip you solder directly onto a motherboard — at 512GB and one gram, in mass quantities rather than samples.
First-order effects
- Device makers designing ultrathin laptops and tablets gain a drop-in 512GB storage component that weighs one gram and needs no drive bay or M.2 slot, freeing board space and thickness budget.
Second-order effects
- Slot-based SSD formats lose their monopoly on thin-device designs, pressuring rivals like Micron to field their own BGA-packaged NVMe parts or cede the soldered-storage segment Samsung just opened.
Third-order effects
- If soldered-down NVMe becomes the default for portable computing, storage shifts from an upgradeable module to a fixed system component — a structural win for flash suppliers and a loss for the upgrade-and-repair market.
The trend: SSDs are migrating from replaceable cards toward soldered system-on-board components, with Samsung's V-NAND and NVMe stack setting the pace that competitors like Micron must follow.