FORTASA BLOG

Flash SSD Collects Data 20,000 Meters Above Earth - Reliable Operation High in The Sky

Weather Balloon with Data Acquisition Payload

One of our customers has a peculiar requirement for our SSDs. They have to be able to function 20,000 feet up in the air. What a challenge !!!

Turns out he is manufacturing special equipment that measures atmospheric content of the stratosphere which is extends around 31 miles (50 km) down to about 4 to 12 miles (6 to 20 km) above the Earth's surface. This layer contains 19 percent of the atmosphere's gases. Monitoring the content of this layer gives scientists critical information about air pollution, volcanic activity, atmospheric changes, and even radiation fall out.

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Bill of Material Locking Guarantees Product Integrity - Don't Repeat Unnecessary SSD Product Qualifications

Our local manufacturers’ representative found an excellent opportunity for our products, and took me into a sales call. The customer profile was perfect; this was a manufacturer of Utility Meters. Business volume was medium size. SSD requirements were quite common, low capacity, high reliability, longest life expectancy, industrial temperature support.

Bill of Material Lock for all Fortasa SSDs

I was ready to was ready to do another run of my corporate and product presentation, talk about our unique technology, life expectancy verification, product qualification process and our production capability, something I perform on practically every sales call.

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Using SMART Command to Monitor Life of SSD or Flash Card

SMART Command Information

Predicting usable life of an SSD or Flash card is more of an art than a science. Not only is it dependent on the Flash components used and Firmware algorithm, but also on the device usage model which in most situations is inherently impossible to predict.

However, monitoring the SSD usage for Flash media end of life is quite customary. A standard way of monitoring the media is through the use of SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) Command. The SMART command is an open standard, as defined by the work group at T13.org, allowing an individual disk drive in the ATA/IDE or SCSI interface to automatically monitor its own health and report potential problems to the host in order to anticipate drive failures and prevent data loss. The SMART information is collected during the drive operation and helps host to predict the likelihood of drive failure due to critical use conditions.

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CompactFlash Card - Celebrating 20-year Anniversary - Still Designed in Industrial Applications

CFA Oversees the CF Card Standard

One of the most widespread Flash Card standards is CompactFlash (CF). Introduced initially by SanDisk in 1994, this format survived multiple generations of specification revisions and is still quite a popular choice in Industrial and some consumer applications. Confined to an most common (Type I) physical dimensions of 43mm × 36mm × 3.3 mm, CompactFlash card is manufactured in capacities of upto 128GBytes and offers sustained performance of up to 200MB/sec.

The CompactFlash standard is governed by the CompactFlash Association (CFA) which manages updates to the standard, oversees device compliance and certifies compliant products. The CompactFlash standard not only incorporates Flash memory based devices, but also HDDs and I/O cards in the same physical form factor. CFA has also announced extensions to the CF spec - CFast (SATA interface CompactFlash card form factor) and XQD (PCIe Interface CompactFlash card form factor).

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