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 eMMC | Small Size SSD for Embedded Applications

Fortasa Industrial eMMC device

As the rapid pace of innovation of technology drives products to become lighter, smaller and cheaper, the same principal drives the storage products. In the last few years the commonly utilized CompactFlash card form factor was surpassed by the SD card standard, later to be overtaken by an even smaller microSD card. In the embedded industry, the 2.5" HDDs were overtaken by a smaller form factor Flash Modules and now rapidly replaced by a single chip SSDs.

eMMC is the most common choices in the single chip SSD offering. Benefiting the customer by a universal standard, small footprint, fast performance and multitude of suppliers, the eMMC is being rapidly designed-in not just consumer, but Industrial applications.

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Fake Industrial Grade Flash Storage Devices | SSDs, Flash Cards and Modules

Fake Industrial Grade Flash Storage  Devices - Beware of Impostors

On my many trips to different parts of Asia, I never failed to be accosted by strange salesmen trying to offer jeweled Swiss watches, name brand women's bags, designer perfumes and other luxury goods. These products look extremely genuine, high attention to detail, luxury boxes, glossy user manuals. Yet they are offered for a fraction of what the same item would cost in an American store. How is this done?

It is a common knowledge that Asia is full of brand name knock-offs, which are good looking copies of the expensive luxury goods built at a low quality Asian manufacturing facility using inferior component parts. So while the offered item might look and feel like a genuine part, it sure is NOT !

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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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