At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in 2019, Toshiba unveiled the company’s fourth NVMe SSD. The thumb-sized SSD is twice the capacity of its 1TB predecessor and has doubled the number of PCIe lanes. The SSD was developed for tablets and notebooks in the low and medium price segment.
The SSD is available as a plug-in module in M.2-2230 format or as a soldered BGA version. Toshiba has arranged the controller and the flash memory chips on top of each other in the case in order to implement the small form factor with high capacity at the same time. The range extends from 128 GByte to 1 TB capacity.
The speed of the Toshiba BG4 is at a maximum sequential read rate of 2.25 GByte/s and a maximum write speed of 1.7 GByte/s. The maximum read rate of the Toshiba BG4 is 2.25 GByte/s and the maximum write speed is 1.7 GByte/s. The Toshiba BG4 can be used with a wide range of memory devices. It can be assumed that with larger data volumes, the speed drops significantly as soon as the SLC buffer is filled and the normal TLC memory must be used. Since the SSD does not have a DRAM cache, the technique called ‘host memory buffer’ is used instead, which stores the mapping table in the working memory.
Toshiba partners are already receiving initial samples of the SSD. The general availability starts in the second quarter. Toshiba has not yet released the price of the SSD, but it is expected to be on a par with traditional SATA SDDs. One of the partners already getting the SSDs is Lenovo, who are using the SSD as a second drive on some Thinkpads as an alternative to the LTE modem.
