I can definitely see the perks of the form factor here, and totally see SSD cooling hardware as being the next big thing, and it sounds like they're prepared for that here.
But I mourn how fast the interface format is changing now, because I don't have the hardware to support all of these formats. I've got a handy USB to SATA adapter that did the job for, I don't know, a decade and a half, and now there's eight different types of SSD sockets out there.
I think this new format is nice because it requires no tools to install, like most other components e.g. RAM.
In contrast, current M2 NVMe have this annoying screw that requires a fairly specialized screwdriver and tends to get stuck in some motherboards. Not a good design. So Toshiba's new form factor looks like a step forward.
I refuse to replace my NVMe for this reason alone. That screw is going to get stuck somewhere and I'm going to have to take the motherboard out completely to get it, hoping the whole time I didn't fry anything.
I just built a new computer and didn't seem to have an issue that I can remember installing the M.2 NVMe storage. Now I'm slightly worried I might have missed something, lol.
Granted, I've had a set of tiny screw screw drivers for a while now, so maybe that's what you're referring to? These screw drivers aren't that specialized, are they? They're still just Phillips-head, right? Just smaller?
On one hand, I'm inclined to agree with you; but on the other, we've seen huge growth in disk speeds, density, and affordability. All though, I think we've hit a slow-down in improvement if the garbage that is QLC is any evidence. Seriously, I can't believe that manufacturers are trying to force that down our throat.
Its crazy my 2.5" SSD died last week and I opted to go from 2 different SSDs to 1 2 tb nvme SSD. I too have a USB to Sata adapter but now I can't use it on my personal computer.
I do have a thunderbolt external nvme adapter they have got a lot cheaper.
Is the Thunderbolt adaptor you're using the same as my Transcend JetDrive 855? I successfully tested it with an Intel 660P 2 TB into an M.2 to Mac adaptor.
Less common and I might be mangling terminology , but there's also PCIe, PCIe-Mini, mSATA, SATA Express (same connector as SATA). There's also a variety of m.2 form factors
I bought a Rock Pi 4 and the whole kit-n-kaboodle. Just finished doing some benchmarking and it has pretty impressive performance, but it definitely needs assistance staying cool. The case I have is aluminum with the bottom of the case being a whole-board heatsink, and I still had to set it on top of ice packs with a fan blowing to keep it from throttling under heavy benchmarking load.
I think one thing people don't think about with SBCs is that we are making pretty significant thermal performance trade-offs. I wish somebody made a case with a clean flow through and at least 1 120mm fan in it.
I bought one of these for fun, with the whole kit, NVMe drive and a nice aluminum case... not sure what I am going to do with it but it's a really nice little PC and amazing what it can do.
Ongoing work on the reverse-engineered Panfrost OpenGL ES driver for Arm Mali GPUs has turned the RK3399 SoC into a very attractive platform to try out Wayland on ARM devices.
This doesn't seem to be targeted at the frequently-swapped use cases that SD cards are made for. It's more about adding repairability/upgradability to internal primary storage in small devices. For that use case, the 4x throughput advantage is probably reason enough to rule out SD Express.
I don't think the connector is the problem but the devices you connect to. RPis are notorious for having a poor lifespan due to reading/writing from the SD cards, but I think that's mostly due to the cost tier of a $30 computer.
Hardkernel saw this need and addressed it; their boards use an eMMC daughterboard with a standardized connector that I could swear I've seen picked up by a few other vendors now.
I wonder if they'll switch over to this on some future generation.
Please correct me if I’m wrong but no RaspPi has a PCIe interface, yet. From the embedded side of things, I would expect that to be a whole Pi generation out. Even then, I’m honestly not sure what the use case is, the Pi is doing amazing things with SPI and USB.
We’ve come full circle back to primary storage that drops into a socket.
All things considered, that’s not a bad looking socket system. With thermal limitation the issue, it seems BGA+heat sink will still outperform but at the cost of not being upgradable. Still, seems like a fair idea to have a PCIe4 MicroSD.
Definitely nice for SFF... but I don't think that higher performing devices will be able to dissipate enough heat from the lid alone. Most PCIe gen 4 SSDs have relatively large heat spreaders because of the load.
Similarly, I keep thinking it would be cool to have a GPU socket format that could sit adjacent to the CPU so that a large heat pipe / cooler could be attached to both.
>I keep thinking it would be cool to have a GPU socket format that could sit adjacent to the CPU so that a large heat pipe / cooler could be attached to both.
That's pretty much exactly how modern high end laptops with dedicated graphics processors work
That bracket reminds me a lot of a CPU bracket. It's not hard to imagine a hole in the top so you could mount a heatsink with direct contact to the card.
Something that I think people are glancing over, this has some huge potential in the laptop / pro tablet space. I don't think someone like Apple would ever move to something like this, but standard NVMe mounting solutions are probably taller than they need to be. This is also a screwless solution which while not a huge deal, is pretty neat.
In my eyes, this sort of connector gives manufacturers no reason to solder on storage. There's the cooling issue, but looking at something like the MacBook I could see it integrated into the CPU block or even the bottom case. Hell, if they did the bottom case it might even give some support to the logic board and they won't have as many issues with the board flexing. No rubber pads needed!
Who cares about laptops and tablets? They already have fast ports. You already can put a real NVMe drive into a USB enclosure and get ridiculously fast external storage.
This new form factor would be perfect for cameras that shoot RAW video or high-bandwidth video. Until recently you'd need to buy very expensive and fast SD cards or proprietary RED mags to be able to record high quality high resolution video. BMPCC4K was the first (very affordable) camera that allowed recording directly into a USB SSD.
Seeing as how most premium laptops today are using some sort of PCI-E storage... I would say professionals that are using their laptops as workstations care. This isn't an interconnect made for external use per se, but for replaceable storage. In the article it specifically is mentioned as a replacement for soldered BGA storage. The way the mechanism works (which is very similar to old full size SIM card slots on old feature phones) is meant to act as a more permanent socket than something like a spring loaded SD card slot or USB port. It's more akin to a CPU socket.
For laptops and tablets this could be a huge move, partially because of the user-serviceable upgrade potential, but also because of data recovery. Instead of the flash chips and their controller being on the same board as the CPU, GPU, muxes, power management systems, etc, they can now fit in a secure, low profile and low footprint socket. Take newer MacBook Pros for instance. They have soldered on storage and no way to access that data if the logic board dies. Previously, Apple had outfit the board with a "lifeboat" connector that allows for data transfer from the soldered on storage (assuming it's still intact) without having a fully working board.
Louis Rossmann, of course, went over this in a video just a couple days ago. He had a customer that sent a machine in that is a few-months-old MacBook Pro 13". It has a dead T2 chip which renders the entire logic board useless. There is no way (short of desoldering the flash chips and possibly putting it on a working donor board, but then you run into a whole slew of other issues) to recover data off of that machine.
Because having a USB drive hanging off the side of your laptop is a PITA, having to unmount it to disconnect before packing your laptop, etc.
This new form factor changes nothing for cameras since cameras have proprietary storage for the sole reason of squeezing producers for more cash. RED mags just have cheap (not even high-end) M.2 SATA SSDs inside them, and the camera has a DRM check to ensure that it's one sold by them so you can't just swap it out for a higher capacity one.
Why would they ever adopt an open standard when they can charge thousands of dollars for a proprietary one instead?
It's not a new use case, it's still used to connect a card to a board. Just like the hinged connector used for microSD before this [0]. It's more USB 3.0 type A connector vs. the USB 2.0 type A.
Neither the connector itself nor the application are innovative. Which is why nobody is pointing out the particular innovation in the connector.
Last week I purchased an NVMe drive for a small home server I'm building. Take into consideration the last time I bought components was about 6 years ago so it absolutely blew my mind seeing how small the NVMe drive was, like the size of a chocolate bar and barely more than 1mm tall. I took photos of it in the palm of my hand!
Seeing they're looking into shrinking these things even further is even more incredible to me!
Readit News
But I mourn how fast the interface format is changing now, because I don't have the hardware to support all of these formats. I've got a handy USB to SATA adapter that did the job for, I don't know, a decade and a half, and now there's eight different types of SSD sockets out there.
In contrast, current M2 NVMe have this annoying screw that requires a fairly specialized screwdriver and tends to get stuck in some motherboards. Not a good design. So Toshiba's new form factor looks like a step forward.
Why. Why make a screw that small. It's torture.
Granted, I've had a set of tiny screw screw drivers for a while now, so maybe that's what you're referring to? These screw drivers aren't that specialized, are they? They're still just Phillips-head, right? Just smaller?
I do have a thunderbolt external nvme adapter they have got a lot cheaper.
This is pretty amazing; much better than the current eMMC and SDCard based storage solutions on a lot of dev boards.
http://rockpi.org/
I think one thing people don't think about with SBCs is that we are making pretty significant thermal performance trade-offs. I wish somebody made a case with a clean flow through and at least 1 120mm fan in it.
https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2019/08/06/rock...
I wonder if they'll switch over to this on some future generation.
https://blog.hackster.io/meet-the-new-raspberry-pi-4-model-b...
All things considered, that’s not a bad looking socket system. With thermal limitation the issue, it seems BGA+heat sink will still outperform but at the cost of not being upgradable. Still, seems like a fair idea to have a PCIe4 MicroSD.
What are you referring to?
https://youtu.be/BnHW-f5ayhs?t=108
Similarly, I keep thinking it would be cool to have a GPU socket format that could sit adjacent to the CPU so that a large heat pipe / cooler could be attached to both.
That's pretty much exactly how modern high end laptops with dedicated graphics processors work
In my eyes, this sort of connector gives manufacturers no reason to solder on storage. There's the cooling issue, but looking at something like the MacBook I could see it integrated into the CPU block or even the bottom case. Hell, if they did the bottom case it might even give some support to the logic board and they won't have as many issues with the board flexing. No rubber pads needed!
This new form factor would be perfect for cameras that shoot RAW video or high-bandwidth video. Until recently you'd need to buy very expensive and fast SD cards or proprietary RED mags to be able to record high quality high resolution video. BMPCC4K was the first (very affordable) camera that allowed recording directly into a USB SSD.
For laptops and tablets this could be a huge move, partially because of the user-serviceable upgrade potential, but also because of data recovery. Instead of the flash chips and their controller being on the same board as the CPU, GPU, muxes, power management systems, etc, they can now fit in a secure, low profile and low footprint socket. Take newer MacBook Pros for instance. They have soldered on storage and no way to access that data if the logic board dies. Previously, Apple had outfit the board with a "lifeboat" connector that allows for data transfer from the soldered on storage (assuming it's still intact) without having a fully working board.
Louis Rossmann, of course, went over this in a video just a couple days ago. He had a customer that sent a machine in that is a few-months-old MacBook Pro 13". It has a dead T2 chip which renders the entire logic board useless. There is no way (short of desoldering the flash chips and possibly putting it on a working donor board, but then you run into a whole slew of other issues) to recover data off of that machine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi9en4I-tjA
This new form factor changes nothing for cameras since cameras have proprietary storage for the sole reason of squeezing producers for more cash. RED mags just have cheap (not even high-end) M.2 SATA SSDs inside them, and the camera has a DRM check to ensure that it's one sold by them so you can't just swap it out for a higher capacity one.
Why would they ever adopt an open standard when they can charge thousands of dollars for a proprietary one instead?
Neither the connector itself nor the application are innovative. Which is why nobody is pointing out the particular innovation in the connector.
[0] https://www.yamaichi.de/products/connector-solutions/card-co...
Seeing they're looking into shrinking these things even further is even more incredible to me!