Not content with making the world's highest-capacity microSD card, Samsung is doubling down on a miniature solid-state drive that's barely the size of a fingernail but stores a whopping 512 gigabytes of data.
The first of its kind, the PM971-NVMe SSD is a single ball grid array (BGA) package comprised of 16 V-NAND flash chips, one 20nm mobile DRAM chip, and a high-performance controller.
Essentially, this gives the SSD has the guts of several chips compressed into one, allowing it to keep its minuscule dimensions of 20mm x 16mm x 1.5mm and only weigh a single gram.
The SSD is also lightning-quick, capable of writing data at a blazing speed of 1,500MB/s. Samsung claims it transfers a full-HD movie in three seconds - and downloads one from scratch in six.
"We are determined to push the competitive edge in premium storage line-ups - NVMe SSDs, external SSDs, and UFS (Universal Flash Storage) - by moving aggressively to enhance performance and capacity in all three markets," said Joo Sun Choi, Executive Vice President of Samsung's Memory Sales and Marketing.
"Aggressively" sounds about right, as Samsung announced earlier this year that it was also developing UFS 2.0 chips that could cram up to 256GB into high-end mobile devices.
Samsung is intending the PM971-NVMe SSD for use "in next-generation PCs and ultra-slim notebook PCs," and will be making its way to consumers and manufacturers worldwide in less than a month from now, in 512GB, 256GB and 128GB sizes.
Specifics on prices have not been mentioned, but considering the current cost of solid-state technology - and high-capacity storage in general, with Samsung's record-breaking microSD costing a hefty $249.99 - we can't imagine devices outfitted with the PM971 will come cheap.
Samsung also announced it's far from done improving the speed and capacity of its NVMe SSDs - at this rate, we wouldn't be shocked if the company set sights on a terabyte-sized drive before the year is out.
