FORTASA BLOG

Oftentimes we get emails from customers looking for a Flash storage solution for an application that had been designed quite a few years back. Usually this involves either a low capacity HDD or Flash card replacement or an interface that has been technically obsoleted long ago.

Legacy Cockpit Electronics

As an example, one of our customers refurbishes old airplanes. The business involves keeping the plane hull and upgrading the cockpit electronics. Well, the old airplanes, obviously, have older components, and the HDD in the black box is typically in the 10's of Megabytes range. Nowadays, one can easily buy a HDD in 100's of Gigabytes or even Terrabytes, but to buy a brand new HDD with only 10's of Megabytes is not possible.

And what is even more frustrating that the modern high capacity HDDs are not recognized by the legacy electronics and system software that was developed generations ago, before such high capacity storage systems were even contemplated.

So the daunting task for this customer was to replace the legacy electronics and working software to accommodate the higher capacity drives or find a replacement low capacity drive. Given that the volume of these plane retrofits is rather small and the cost of time and development for software re-write rather high (not too mention the extensive regression tests required to make sure nothing was impacted by the software changes) the obvious choice is to find the direct replacement drive.

This is when the customer found Fortasa Memory Systems, Inc. He was desperate for us to modify our SSD with the exact same capacity (CHS settings) as the legacy HDD. The smallest available NAND Flash chip now is a 1Gbit device, given the minimal capacity of the SSD of 128MBytes. Due to our ability to modify SSD Flash controller firmware, we programmed a change to have the controller think it was interfacing an older, smaller density, flash component. With this change, the SSD appeared exactly like the legacy HDD to the system and even though the real capacity of the drive was much higher, it was transparent to the system OS and it operated well in the legacy plane environment.

Fortasa Memory Systems, Inc. has the ability to emulate slammer capacity SSDs and match the settings of the older generation HDDs, SSDs or Flash cards.

Please contact Fortasa to discuss your solid state product requirements or your production needs.