FORTASA BLOG

Industrial SSD Bill of Material Locking | Who Can You Trust | Fortasa Memory Systems, Inc.

One of the most memorable phrases that my mother used when I was growing up was - "Don't trust the book by it's cover !". This was meant for me to look beyond the flashy advertisement and glorified promotional specs and really understand the value and the promise the product or relationship had. The same proverb could be well used to warn the prospective customer about the Industrial SSD products.

A customer is typically barraged by multiple factors when evaluating an Industrial Solid State Drive purchase. The price point, cost per gigabyte, data transfer and IOPS speeds and type of NAND flash memory used are all vitally important when assessing the value of an SSD drive. However, there is one item typically business customers frequently take for granted during the evaluation  process: the bill of materials. It's not surprising why this checklist would not get more than a cursory check. After all, it is common sense that manufacturers should be using the best materials and components when producing the end products. In addition, any sale production should put a major focus of product quality and consistency of operation. This, unfortunately, is not always the case.

At the lowest level, the bill of materials is nothing more than a list of the approved subsystems and components that make up a larger product. End users may not feel that this is of importance and should not be concerned with this kind of minor detail, but issues with a product's BoM can directly affect its performance and reliability.

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Industrial CompactFlash Cards and PATA SSDs | Still Committed to Manufacturing

The CompactFlash (CF) card form factor has been in use since the early 1990's. Originally embraced by the consumer devices such as Digital Cameras and MP3 players it has more recently migrated to the industrial and embedded platforms.

The CompactFlash card has many distinct advantages: common interface, installed base of manufacturers, specification stability and minimum innovation. In recent years, however, Parallel ATA (PATA) systems and respectively, CF cards have been slowly replaced by SATA interface systems and multiple form factors they incorporate.

Industrial CompactFlash card

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Industrial SD cards | Portable Storage for Embedded Designs

Consumer product innovation has always been driven by an insatiable need to create smaller, lighter, faster and cheaper designs. This was not the case with Industrial and Embedded applications where product reliability and continuation of supply have been the drivers in component selection. However, the popularity and universal acceptance of consumer devices has also driven the embedded designs toward integration of consumer standards.

Fortasa Industrial SD Card

The same could be said of the progression of Flash card standards in the embedded space. CompactFlash card was a universally accepted storage device in the embedded designs. As the consumer industry migrated rapidly from CompactFlash card to SD card and microSD form factors, the embedded designers have also migrated the new designs t use the now ubiquitous SD card standard.

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Flash Memory Controller - Heart of the Industrial Storage System

Frequently we receive customer inquiries about our Industrial Storage products where they don't understand the difference between an Industrial and Consumer solution and how the technology and product quality differs.

While my colleague addressed this question from the point of view of product manufacturing, I would like to address it from the point of view of technology and specifically about the Industrial Flash Controller that transparently manages the host system interface to NAND Flash media.

As part of the NAND Flash management algorithm, Flash controller performs the following discrete tasks:

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