Toshiba Has Unveiled the BG4 Series SSDs with 96L 3D NAND

Toshiba Has Unveiled the BG4 Series SSDs with 96L 3D NAND

Toshiba, a famous storage company around the world, has announced the fourth generation NVMe SSD with the 96-layer 3D NAND flash memory at CES 2019. The Toshiba BG4 SSD is a significant upgrade of the previous BG3 SSD since it takes the newest 96-layer 3D NAND flash memory instead of the 64-layer 3D NAND. With this feature, Toshiba BG4 SSD can provide larger storage size and consume less power.

The Toshiba BG4 SSD also uses a new controller supporting PCIe 3X 4 rather than the PCIe 3×2 controller used in BG2 and BG3 SSD. This feature also opens the door of the much higher sequential I/O performance.

Toshiba 96-layer 3D NAND SSD comes in large storage size, ranging from 128GB to 1TB and the form factor is M.2 16x20mm BGA. Its sequential read and write speed can reach up to 2250MB/s and 1700MB/s. Its random read and write are about 380,000 IOPS and 190,000 IOPS.

Toshiba claims that this sequential read and write speed are increased by 50% and 70% compared with the last generation BG3 SSD. And the random read and write IOPS are increased by 153% and 90%. So it is obviously that the Toshiba BG4 SSD offers better transmission rate.

The Toshiba BG4 SSD is a DRAMless SSD that relies on the NVMe Host Memory Buffer feature to migrate the performance penalties that a DRAMless drive otherwise suffers from. Thus, the Toshiba BG4 SSD has a smaller footprint than the standard SSD and it also takes influence to the performance relative to a full-size, M.2 2280 SSD.

In addition, Toshiba is the first one to use the 96-layer 3D NAND flash memory. It has launched the Toshiba XG6 M.2 NVMe SSD in the last year which is the first SSD using the 96-layer 3D NAND. Furthermore, the Toshiba BG4 SSD would be the second one to take advantage of 96-layer 3D NAND flash memory.

However, the Toshiba PCIe SSD would be an entry-level NVME SSD among the OEM market, and this SSD is more suitable for those embedded devices where the slower eMMC memory would be used, so it has largely escaped the attention from consumers. Even the Toshiba RC100 which is the retail derivative of BG3’s also fails to get much attention since its price is higher than the SATA products.

Compared with Toshiba BG3 product, the Toshiba BG4 SSD may be likely to see the even broader adoption since it has higher performance, larger storage size. In addition, Toshiba claims that the price of this Toshiba PCIe SSD will be directly competing against the SATA SSD.

The Toshiba BG4 SSD is currently sampling to select OEM customers, and this SSD is expected to be available in the second calendar quarter of 2019.

Final Words

After reading this post, you can know that Toshiba has unveiled the fourth generation BGA SSD and the Toshiba BG4 SSD is the second one taking the 96-layer 3D NAND flash memory which can provide higher sequential read and write speed and large storage size up to 1TB.