Xiaomi Black Shark 4 Phones Get 3GB/s Phison E13T BGA NVMe SSD

Xiaomi recently announced the Black Shark 4 series of gaming phones with the introduction of the Black Shark 4 and Black Shark 4 Pro. The Black Shark 4 is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 870 SoC and the Black Shark 4 Pro is powered by the more powerful Snapdragon 888 SoC.

When it comes to storage the official specifications show they have UFS 3.1 storage and super fast SKhynix LPDDR5 RAM. UFS 3.1-compliant storage devices need to offer a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 2.9 GB/s. We ran across a YouTube video teardown of the Black Shark 4 and found that it uses a purpose built Phison BGA NVMe SSD inside!

The same channel ran AndroBench on the Black Shark 4 Pro to get performance results. The benchmark showed the Phison BGA NVMe storage drive was capable of reaching 2959.83 MB/s. Xiaomi says that read and write performance has been improved by 69% for this model thanks to the new storage solution.

Legit Reviews had a briefing with Phison at CES 2021 and was told about the Phison-powered E13T BGA SSD. This looks like it could be their first launched design win with it in the mobile space!

The Phison E13T BGA NVMe storage solution consists of a dual storage design that shows as a single volume to the user. The small primary storage area is for UFS to go along with the ARM SoC design. There is a much larger secondary storage area that is all NVMe. The entire SSD takes up 11.5mm x 15mm and uses just 1W of active power.

The Black Shark 4 starts with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage for 2,499 Chinese yuan (roughly $383), while the 4 Pro starts at 3,999 yuan (about $613) and has 8GB of RAM with 256GB of storage.

Both models will be available to purchase on March 26th, 2021.