- Biwin’s Mini SSD brings tiny NVMe storage into consumer devices
- The format’s future depends on whether Biwin opens up the standard to others
- Tray-filled design offers quick removable storage, but adoption remains uncertain
Biwin’s Mini SSD format has taken another step into the consumer market with the tiny CL100 NVMe card now available for purchase.
The product is a faster alternative to microSD with a footprint far smaller than even an M.2 2230 drive.
The CL100 measures just 15 x 17 x 1.4mm, weighs around 1g and uses a SIM tray instead of a traditional connector. It supports PCIe 4.0 x2 and NVMe 1.4 with claimed speeds of up to 3700 MB/s read and 3400 MB/s write. Random performance reaches as high as 650K IOPS. The card is waterproof, dustproof and drop-resistant to 3m.
RD510 USB enclosure
Capacity options are 512GB for ¥599 ($85), 1TB for ¥1,099 ($155), and 2TB for ¥2,199 ($311). Retailers in China are reportedly already selling the two smaller versions.
Biwin also offers the RD510 (pictured above), a USB4 40 Gbps enclosure with a small fan that turns the Mini SSD into a portable external drive. It’s intended to help push the format beyond handhelds and into laptops, tablets and cameras that can benefit from fast removable storage.
The new drive follows early use in handheld gaming devices such as the GPD Win 5 and OneXPlayer Super X. These devices introduced the idea of a pin-replaceable tray-loaded NVMe module.
Once removed, the card acts much like an internal SSD pulled from a laptop – just much smaller.
The mini SSD format still faces a pretty tough hurdle to ignore. We noted in September that new storage standards only gain traction when they are supported by more than one vendor.
MicroSD succeeded because SanDisk submitted it to the SDA so others could adopt it. Biwin has not confirmed any plans to follow that route.
Without support from groups like the SDA or the PCI SIG, the Mini SSD could remain too niche for wider adoption.
The speed, toughness and small size of the format give it a clear appeal, but unless other companies support the standard, it risks repeating the pattern of previous proprietary formats that never reached their true potential, which would be a great shame.
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