Toshiba announces BG4 96-layer 3D flash NVMe SSD with up to 1TB capacity

Today at CES 2019, Toshiba announced a new SSD series. Designed primarily for PC manufacturers, the "BG4," as it is called, is an NVMe SSD that features 96-layer 3D flash and up to 1TB capacity.

While the drive is not necessarily intended for consumers to buy directly, it will undoubtedly find its way to them through PC purchases. So yes, it is OK to be excited for it, folks -- especially since it is significantly faster than its predecessor, the BG3.

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"This new series of single package SSDs, featuring PCIe Gen3 x4 lanes, offers sequential read performance up to 2,250 MB/s, and with improved flash management delivers industry-leading random read performance up to 380,000 IOPS. The BG4 single package SSDs are suitable for compact and performance-oriented systems, such as ultra-thin PC notebooks, IoT embedded systems and server boot in data centers," says Toshiba.

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The company further says, "Additionally, the BG4 series improves upon the prior generation BG3 series in sequential and random write performance by approximately 70 percent and 90 percent respectively. Furthermore, power efficiency was improved up to 20 percent in read and 7 percent in write by utilizing Toshiba Memory's cutting-edge BiCS FLASHTM 3D flash memory and a new SSD controller."

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As is typical for CES announcements, we don't know anything about pricing, and availability is a bit of as mystery as well. Toshiba simply says the SSD will be sold in Q2 of 2019, meaning April, May, or June -- an absolute eternity! What we do know definitively, however, is the capacity options -- 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1,024GB. Computer manufacturers can opt for a solderable M.2 1620 or a removable M.2 2230.