Product category:
Memory Devices and Modules
News Release from: Flint | Subject: SimpleTech IDE and SCSI Flash drives
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 13 June 2002
Flash drives squeeze in to cut power
Designers looking for a plug-in replacement to mechanical hard drives now have a wider range of options from Flint Smart.
Designers looking for a plug-in replacement to mechanical hard drives now have a wider range of options from Flint Smart New families of IDE and SCSI Flash drives from SimpleTech will complement Flint's existing portfolio of Flash disk modules and kits, providing all-in-one solutions for industrial workstations, network storage and upgrades of legacy systems
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 22 Feb 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
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Where designers need rugged reliability and 10-year data retention over extended operating regimes, SimpleTech's IDE Flash drives are available in 3.5in form factor up to 1GByte capacity, with 2.5in models going up to 2Gbyte.
The three-and-a-half-inch SCSI-2 drives provide up to 4Gbyte of solid-state storage.
All offer complete plug-in replaceability with industry-standard connectors and interfaces.
The IDE drives include an IDE controller, support the standard ATA register and command set, and can be configured as master or slave devices.
Likewise, SimpleTech's SCSI product, which includes common command-set support (CCS), is a form, fit and function replacement for legacy systems using mechanical hard disk drives.
Flash drive data storage is ideally suited to military/aerospace, telecommunications and network management applications.
The SimpleTech units can withstand shocks up to 500G and 20G of operating vibration, whereas mechanical drives offer shock resistance less than 125G and vibration capability up to 1G.
Compared with the narrow operational envelope of rotating disks, normal operation of the solid-state drives is guaranteed from -40 to +85C.
Reliability is enhanced by wear-levelling algorithms used to maximise the life of the Flash array by ensuring that erase zones are used evenly across the entire Flash array.
MTBF is typically 1million hours.
Read and write performance is orders of magnitude better than mechanical drives, exemplified by typical seek times of 1.25ms and latency less than 0.1ms.
The small form-factor IDE drives deliver read performance of up to 1.5Mbyte/s and write speeds up to 3Mbyte/s, while the 4Gbyte SCSI model boasts sustained read and write speeds of 5.3 and 4.3Mbyte/s, respectively.
A further advantage is low power consumption of 0.6W compared with typically 8.5W for mechanical hard disk drives.
The 2.5in IDE drives operate from a 3.3V power supply and require just 0.2mA in sleep mode and 25mA read and write current.
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