Samsung Electronics Co has started volume production of ultra-tiny   512GB NVMe PCIe solid state drive, or SSD in what the chip maker said is the world’s first ever and smallest ever.

A short for Non-Volatile Memory Express, the NVMe PCIe SSD comes in a single ball grid array, or BGA package, targeting next-generation PC and ultra-slim notebook PC market.

Named PM971-NVMe, the SSD is a 20mm x 16mm x 1.5mm concentration of 16 48-layer 256Gb V-NAND flash chips, one 20nm-circuitry 4Gb LPDDR4 mobile DRAM chip, and a high-performance memory controller.

It weighs only about one gram, lighter than a dime that scales just 2.3 grams. The single BGA package size is approximately a hundredth of a 2.5-inch SSD or HDD, and its surface area is about a fifth of an M.2 SSD, ensuring device manufacturers extreme design flexibility and freedom.

The chip is not all about the extreme scaling down of the footprint.

As it incorporates a NVMe, an optimized, high performance, scalable host controller interface technology as well as its own indigenous TurboWrite technology, it outdoes the speed limit of a SATA 6Gb/s interface, performing sequential read and write speeds of up to 1,500MB/s (megabytes per second) and 900MB/s respectively, when the TurboWrite  technology kick offs.

The performance figures translate into transferring a 5GB-equivalent, full-HD movie in about 3 seconds or downloading it in about 6 seconds. It also boasts random read and write IOPS (input output operations per second) of up to 190K and 150K respectively, to easily handle high-speed operations.

A hard drive, by contrast, will only process up to 120 IOPS in random reads, making the new Samsung SSD more than 1500 times faster than an HDD in this regard.

The PM971-NVMe SSD line-up will be available in 512GB, 256GB and 128GB storage options. Samsung will start providing the new SSDs to its customers this month worldwide.

The PM971-NVMe is another milestone extension of its technology leadership in SSD market. Samsung has raced ahead of rivals in rolling out new, advanced and smaller form factor SSDs. In June 2013, for example, Samsung introduced XP941 SSD in M.2 (mini PCI-Express 2.0) form factor measuring 80mm x 22mm, which was also the industry’s first PCIe SSD for PCs.

Now, Samsung plans to rapidly expand its market base in the next-generation premium notebook PC sector with the new high-performance, BGA package, NVMe SSD.

Later this year, Samsung plans to introduce more high-capacity and ultra-fast NVMe SSDs to meet increasing customer needs for improved performance and greater density.