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BiWin CL 100 Mini: 2TB in a 15-by-17 mm footprint

The Die Brief Desk, after Tom's Hardware

BiWin's CL 100 Mini packs up to 2TB of storage into a 15 x 17 mm board, aimed at portable gaming rigs.

Picture from tomshardware.com
Picture from tomshardware.com

The CL 100 Mini measures 15 by 17 mm and carries up to 2TB of storage. That is the entire specification the Tom's Hardware page gives. No interface, no controller, no NAND type, no sequential or random throughput. The form factor is the only number that matters here, and it is small enough to sit in a handheld chassis where a standard M.2 card would not fit.

The constraint is thermal, not capacity. A 2TB NAND stack on a 15-by-17 mm board leaves almost no area for a heatsink or a thermal pad. The document does not state what controller sits under the NAND, nor what interface the drive speaks. If the drive runs at full sequential load in a sealed handheld, the die will throttle. The buyer of a portable gaming rig is told the drive fits; nothing is said about how long it sustains peak throughput before the controller backs off. The fab question is whether the NAND stack is a single-layer or a multi-layer package, because that determines the thermal ceiling. Neither question is answered in the page.

Picture from tomshardware.com
Picture from tomshardware.com

What is still unmeasured: sequential and random I/O, endurance in TBW, the controller die, and the interface. The page gives no benchmark, no power figure, no thermal spec. The 15-by-17 mm footprint is confirmed; everything else is a gap.

The 15-by-17 mm footprint constrains the thermal path for a 2TB NAND stack. Without a published controller or interface, the sustained throughput ceiling is unknown.

15 x 17 mm form factor · Up to 2TB capacity · Targeted at portable gaming · No performance benchmarks published

After Tom's Hardware. We did not report this. The pictures, if any, are theirs.

October 02, 2026 · 2 min
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