[aavotins]

It's BGA, so it's soldered onto the motherboard/logic board. Non user upgradeable, and if the SSD dies, you're in for a costly repair. Another step in the direction of (very) disposable hardware with little to no service options.

[nl]

This isn't necessarily the case. The article explicitly talks about physical standards for putting them on M.2 cards, and how some are already shipping on M.2 and PCI-E form factors.

[noselasd]

Surely someone can solder it onto an USB stick, SATA interface, etc. with the added circuitry of supporting those interfaces.

[yitchelle]

Does the other packages give you this ability? The other fine pitch parts are also very difficult to change over.

[aavotins]

This is a chip that gets soldered directly on the board. While it is possible to solder this specific chip to a detachable interface that can be removed, I highly doubt anyone will ever do it.

This form factor has a huge advantage for OEMs - they can just slap on a single chip that has everything built in - controller, memory management and the actual storage. Less parts = less convoluted assembly process and that is cheaper. While theoretically you can put a BGA fully integrated SSD SOC like this on a PCI-E card or M2 etc., it kinda beats the purpose.

[yitchelle]

Personally, I think BGA parts are great. They are small and quite robust mechanically an highly integrated (as you have said).

I did my early engineering years with DIP parts, the days of when you could just desolder the memory device and place with a higher density device are long gone.

[Nullabillity]

SATA, PCIe, and M.2 drives are trivial to replace.