FORTASA BLOG

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.

READ MORE

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.

READ MORE

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).

READ MORE

WD, STEC, OCZ, Anobit - Where Have They All Gone - Defunct Industrial Flash Storage Suppliers

Can't Source the SSDs Anymore

The Industrial Flash Memory Market landscape has changed dramatically over the last few years. The major suppliers of Industrial Grade Flash cards and SSDs have quietly abandoned the market and the customer base. First, about 18 months ago, Western Digital (WD) announced an abrupt end of life to their Industrial storage products. Then, about a year ago, WD had acquired STEC, a de-facto leader in the Industrial SSD space. SMART Modular's SSD division was sold to SanDisk and Anobit, an innovative SSD provider was snapped up by Apple, and finally just a few weeks ago OCZ was bought out by Toshiba in a bankruptcy proceeding.

Why did this happen, and more importantly where does a customer find a long term reliable supplier for their product needs.

READ MORE