The manufacturer Kioxia has presented its BG5 family of very small SSD drives. These tiny SSDs come with an M.2 form factor, a PCIe 4.0 interface, and decent performance.
Kioxia's BG5 series SSDs will come in 256GB, 512GB or 1024GB models of 3-layer BiCS5 112D NAND memory with a 1,2 GT / s interface and come in an M.2-2230 form factor. The drives are based on an NVMe 1.4 compliant controller, unknown for now, but you will likely use your own firmware to optimize the performance and power consumption of your small SSDs.
Tiny SSDs for those with very little space
Kioxia has rated its BG5 drives with a sequential read speed of up to 3.500MB / s and a sequential write speed of up to 2.900MB / s. They feature a Random Read IOPS of up to 500K and a Random Read IOPS of up to 450K.
These performance levels are somewhat below average for an SSD with a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface, but this is because the BG5 cannot physically use many 3D NAND chips and therefore its potential performance is limited by its form factor. Its performance is superior to Samsung's PM991 / PM991a drives, which achieve a sequential read / write of up to 3,10 GBps / 2,0 GBps.
Unlike the previous generation of BG series SSDs, these new drives are not available in the BGA form factor, which prevents them from being installed in PCs that require even smaller drives. This model would be designed for ultra-compact laptops that support PCie expansion, a sector in which some improvement in storage is always going to be very appreciated due to the nature of laptops and their difficulty to expand or even repair.
Source: Tom's Hardware
