- Biwin Mini SSD Brings Small NVMe Storage to Consumer Devices
- The future of the format depends on whether Biwin opens the standard to others
- Tray design offers quick removable storage, but adoption remains uncertain
Biwin’s Mini SSD format has taken another step into the consumer market with the small CL100 NVMe card now available for purchase.
The product is a faster alternative to microSD with a much smaller footprint 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-style slot 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 up to 650,000 IOPS. The card is resistant to water, dust and drops from 3 m.
RD510 USB Box
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 40Gbps USB4 enclosure with a small fan that turns the Mini SSD into a portable external drive. Its goal is to help push the format beyond handhelds and into laptops, tablets, and cameras that could benefit from fast removable storage.
The new drive follows initial use in portable gaming devices such as GPD Win 5 and OneXPlayer Super X. These devices introduced the idea of a tray-loaded NVMe module that could be swapped with a pin.
Once removed, the card functions much like an internal SSD removed from a laptop, only much smaller.
The Mini SSD format still faces a hurdle that’s pretty hard to ignore. In September we observed that new storage standards only gain traction when they are supported by more than one manufacturer.
The MicroSD was successful because SanDisk submitted it to the SDA, allowing others to adopt it. Biwin has not confirmed any plans to go that route.
Without support from groups like SDA or PCI SIG, the Mini SSD might remain too niche for broader acceptance.
The format’s speed, toughness and small size give it clear appeal, but unless other companies get behind the standard, it risks repeating the pattern of previous proprietary formats that never reached their true potential, which would be a huge shame.
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