Give it up for the Biwin CL100. It looks like a phone SIM card, and it's not the first time we've seen it, but now we have more details. It packs up to 2 TB of proper NVMe storage and runs at up to 3.7 GB/s (via Videocardz). It's not even that outrageously expensive, for now. There is, however, a catch. It's a proprietary rather than open standard.
What really marks this drive out from, say, the even smaller microSD format is the combination of performance and full NVMe 1.4 support. The CL100 measures 15 mm by 17 mm and fits into a slide-in tray that very much resembles a phone SIM tray.
A microSD card is just 11 mm by 15 mm, but doesn't offer all the features and performance of a proper NVMe SSD. The Biwin CL100 does.
At least, it offers the performance of an NVMe drive with a PCIe 4.0 two-lane interface. On the largest 2 TB model, that allows for maximum read speeds of 3.7 GB/s and maximum writes of 3.5 GB/s. For the record, the read IOPS are 550K, the writes 650K.
Those are pretty comparable to figures you'd expect from a full M.2 drive with the same two-lane PCIe 4.0 interface. And despite the fact that you can get faster PCIe 4.0 drives with four lanes, let alone even quicker PCIe 5.0 drives, they're also just pretty decent all-round figures.
The very fastest microSD Express standard, meanwhile, tops out at a theoretical 985 MB/s and the fastest current cards are somewhere in the 800 MB/s region. Not terrible for casual storage, but not really what you want as the basis of system performance.
The aforementioned catch is that this Biwin memory card is obviously not just something you can buy and whack in your PC or, perhaps more pertinently, your handheld gaming PC.
Reportedly, the card has been show off as an internal device inside the GPD Win 5 and OneXPlayer Super X handhelds. But the appeal here is as a card you can just slot into a handheld to upgrade the storage but with essentially the same performance as an internal M.2 drive.
That would require the handheld is fitted with Biwin's proprietary card tray and it's not clear which, if any, handhelds will be so configured. As things stand, then, this is a neat little SSD which has plenty of appeal on paper, but limited practical relevance for now.
Maybe that will change if a load of handheld gaming PC makers adopt it. Presumably if Biwin is launching the card, it expects that there will be devices it can go into (it offers an external USB 4 card reader). Or maybe Biwin will make the card an open standard.
Whatever, for the record the CL100 is available in 512 GB, 1 TB, and 2 TB capacities and priced roughly at $85, $155, and $310. As we understand it, the card is currently only available in China.
