Toshiba Announces New BG SSDs With TLC BiCS Flash In World’s Smallest Form Factor

Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc., a world-leading producer of storage technology and devices, is announcing that it will be showcasing its new BG series of solid-state drives (SSDs) featuring cutting-edge BiCS FLASH™ with TLC technology and Toshiba’s new single-package ball grid array (BGA) NVMe PCIe Gen3 x2 SSD at the 2016 Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, CA from 8/8 through 8/11.  Offering a smaller footprint, lower power consumption and improved performance than traditional storage options, the BG SSD series is designed for future waves of ultra-thin mobile PCs, 2-in-1 convertible notebooks and tablets.

Occupying a surface area that is 95% smaller than a conventional 2.5” SATA SSD, and 82% smaller than an M.2 Type 2280 SSD, Toshiba’s BG series condenses both the controller and NAND flash memory into a single 16mm x 20mm package that enables OEMs to prioritize features, particularly increased battery capacity for longer usage times between the need for recharging.  The BG series of SSDs are also available pre-mounted on a M.2 Type 2230 module for applications that require socketed storage.

BG SSDs feature BiCS FLASH, a three-dimensional (3D) stacked cell structure that makes it possible to accommodate up to 512GB of storage density into this high-performance form factor.  Additionally, the BG series of SSDs utilize a NAND controller and firmware developed in-house by Toshiba for a complete, vertically developed solution, ensuring much tighter integration for optimal performance, reliability and low power consumption.

According to Jeremy Werner, vice president of SSD marketing and product planning for Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc., “We are thrilled to unveil the new BG series with BiCS FLASH which will deliver both a rich feature-set and high performance all within an extremely small footprint and power profile.  We expect to be in production this year with BiCS FLASH BGA SSDs, offering our customers a compelling and cost-effective storage solution for the next generation of high performance ultra-thin and light notebooks and tablets

In order to provide an extremely compact and power efficient storage solution that still offers superior performance with client workloads, the BG series utilizes the latest NVMe standard Host Memory Buffer (HMB) feature, which will be showcased during the 2016 Flash Memory Summit as a reference exhibition.  HMB allocates and uses host DRAM for flash management purposes, as compared to alternative solutions that contain more expensive and power-inefficient DRAM to perform similar functions.  Host Memory Buffer technology provides increased performance over solutions without DRAM by storing lookup data on host memory to reduce access times for commonly accessed data, similar to caching.

Toshiba’s BG SSD Family is to be offered in capacities of 128GB, 256GB and 512GB in both the 16mm x 20mm package (M.2 Type 1620), or a removable M.2 Type 2230 module.  Toshiba is making samples available initially to limited PC OEM customers, and will be available for other customers to develop in Q4 of 2016.  You can view the Toshiba press release in its entirety here.