Ever heard of a “1517” or a “Mini SSD”?

MicroSD cards are tiny but slow; the M.2 storage sticks in your PC are blazing fast but bigger and fully enclosed. Now, a new type of SSD out of China could be the best of both worlds — and it’s already set to appear in two cutting-edge gaming portables.

Chinese storage manufacturer Biwin is calling it the “Mini SSD,” though another manufacturer refers to it as the “1517”; it measures just 15mm x 17mm x 1.4mm thick, smaller than a U.S. penny and just slightly larger than MicroSD. Despite that, it offers maximum sequential read speeds of 3,700 megabytes per second (or 3,400MB/s writes) over a PCIe 4x2 connection, and offers 512GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities.

I suspect this will go over about as well as Samsung’s UFS cards.

So, now we have yet another competing standard for removable storage.

  • @[email protected]
    19•2 days ago

    Headline wasn’t so interesting. Actual details is exciting. Much faster than microsd express but much smaller than full size SD Express. For a phone it may still be preferable for a microsd sized device for space considerations, I miss you UFS cards, and sacrifice top speed. These being in the new GPD Win and I think it was OneXPlayer, solid use case for PC handhelds. Smaller than full sized SD but faster than microSD express, that’s amazing for cameras video and photo. My hope has now left UFS cards and SD Express and now shifted to wanting this being highly adopted. Got to learn how the heat is compared to the current fast full size SD Express and compact flash express cards

    • @[email protected]English
      2•2 days ago

      I think it will be fantastic for expandable storage.

      My imagination is a bit wild at building a nas with dozens of these cards.