Samsung’s new PM971 SSD smiles for the camera

Samsung’s PM971 SSD is easily one of the most interesting additions to the market for quite some time, allowing Samsung to cram up to 512GB of MLC NAND onto a package that is 22mm x 16mm, in size, allowing it to fit easily into small form factor notebook and tablet designs with ease. 

The PM971 is a BGA SSD, which means that it is designed to be directly soldered into systems, preventing these SSDs from being shipped to end users on their own, though that does not prevent Samsung from placing these SSDs on an M.2 card to offer some of the shortest M.2 SSDs that we have ever seen to date. 

Toms Hardware managed to get a sneak peek at this new SSD, confirming that this SSD does use onboard LPDDR4 DRAM alongside its MLC V-NAND to offer some amazing levels of performance for such a small form factor product. Some of these specifications have been known for some time, though if Tom’s hardware is to be believed, Samsung has increased the speeds of this SSD to offer up to 1,500MBps read and 900MBps of write performance, with Samsung claiming random read/write IOPs of 190,000 and 170,000 respectively. 

This SSD has the ability to be rebranded as a Samsung SSD 970 Pro or Evo in time, like a lot of Samsung’s existing PM series lineup. At this time it is unknown exactly how much this new SSD will cost, though it is already known that 28GB, 256GB and 512GB capacity options will be available.