is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
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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.
Image via GPD Image via GPD
To put that in context, the new MicroSD Express cards that work with the Nintendo Switch 2 top out at a theoretical 985MB/s, less than a third the speed. And while a full-size SD Express card could theoretically beat Mini SSD at 3,940MB/s, it would be nearly twice the size of Biwin’s creation.
The nano-SIMs used in recent smartphones are still smaller, though, and M.2 drives are still faster. I whipped up a quick chart so you can easily compare various storage cards and SIMs:
Type Length Width Height Theoretical max speed Mini SSD 15mm 17mm 1.4mm 3,700MB/s MicroSD 11mm 15mm 1mm 985MB/s SD 24mm 32mm ~2mm (varies) 3,940MB/s M.2 2230 22mm 30mm ~2mm (varies) ~8,000MB/s M.2 2280 22mm 80mm ~2mm (varies) ~14,000MB/s Nano-SIM 8.8mm 12.3mm 0.67mm N/A Micro-SIM 12mm 15mm 0.76mm N/A Mini-SIM 15mm 25mm 0.76mm N/A
It’s not clear if Biwin’s Mini SSD is a true standard that other storage makers can easily adopt. But the company’s marketing it for laptops, tablets, phones, cameras and more, with its own dedicated slot that works exactly like smartphone SIM card slots: stick in a pin to remove the tray.
Image: Biwin
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