|
Editor's note: Readers of the free Electronicstalk weekly email newsletter will have read this news the week it was announced. Click here to request to be added to the circulation.
SMART Modular Technologies has added two further products to its IDE Flash drive portfolio: an industry standard 3.5in IDE Flash drive and a mini IDE Flash drive.
The introduction of these additional form factors to its product portfolio underscores SMART's commitment to address the needs of OEM industrial computing applications.
SMART now offers 1.8, 2.5 and 3.5in standard IDE drives available in capacities from 16Mbyte to 1Gbyte.
The new mini Flash drive, available in capacities from 16 to 256Mbyte, allows OEMs to integrate the same level of performance and reliability into embedded applications when real estate is at a premium.
The solid-state drive (SSD) market, such as solid-state plug in replacements for a rotating hard drives, appears to be experiencing renewed interest and growth in the OEM market.
This change in the SSD market seems to be fuelled by technology gains made in Flash memory component densities (eg 2Gbit NAND Flash devices are now in production), and more so, by the rapid decline in Flash memory component ASPs.
SSD pricing has become competitive with the traditional rotating hard disk drive (HDD) at the lower capacity ranges such as 5Gbyte and below.
SMART's SSD products offer data transfer rates of up to 2.4Mbyte/s and burst transfer rates of up to 16Mbyte/s.
SMART's current product roadmap includes Direct memory access (DMA) Multi-Word 2 support and sustained data transfer rates of 5Mbyte/s.
SMART plans to ship IDE Flash drives in industry standard form factors with capacities up to 8Gbyte in Q1 2003.
Enhanced performance and reliability features include: 1 million program/erase cycles; 48bit error detection and correction checking (EDC/ECC); mean-time between failure of better than 3Mh; and industry standard all-metal enclosures.
"There is a growing trend toward HDD replacement primarily due to the inherent unreliability of traditional rotating media; our customers' products typically have field service lives between ten to twenty years", said Grady Lambert, Director of Engineering, Flash Memory Division of SMART.
"When our OEM customers contemplate how to address product lifecycle issues, SSD solutions offer a promising choice for both new and legacy platform integration design activity".
SMART's SSD products are well suited for applications requiring backward compatibility with rotating HDD solutions.
These products also offer superior read/write performance, low power consumption, and high reliability at a competitive cost structure.
In addition, SSD products may be applied across diverse markets such as consumer, industrial/embedded, medical, aerospace/avionics and military.
|
|
