FORTASA BLOG

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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NAND Flash Copyback Command - Hidden Potential for Drive Corruption

Usage of NAND Flash COPYBACK Command Causes Drive Corruption and Data Loss

One of the "Beneficial" features that was added into NAND Flash operation was the COPYBACK Command.

Also known as the INTERNAL DATA MOVE (IDM) operations, Copyback was promoted by the NAND Flash vendors as a performance increasing feature which enabled the data page to be copied from one memory location to another within a NAND device without transferring the data off-chip to a Flash controller.

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Industrial Flash SSD Economics - Premium Value for the Higher Quality

Fortasa Industrial SSD Product Family

Frequently our embedded customers compare our Industrial Grade Flash Card, SSD and other storage products with the consumer grade devices typically found on Amazon, or other retail or e-tail sites. The discrepancy in product cost between the Industrial Grade Flash and its consumer brethren is amazingly wide. Considering that every card, whether Industrial or Consumer, has to have a connector, PCB, Flash Controller and NAND Flash component, they are often dumbfounded as to the such sizable price difference.

Given the lack of transparency, I wanted to elaborate on the economics of building an Industrial vs. a Consumer Flash card and the reason for substantial cost difference.

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Industrial SSD or Flash Cards - Most Reliable Storage Choice for Embedded Storage

Friends frequently ask me, "What is an Industrial SSD, and how does it differ from the one I buy on Amazon and Ebay ?".  This question is quite loaded. From the first look, the Industrial and what I call "Consumer" versions of SSDs or Flash cards seem to be rather similar. Both made of semiconductors and Flash memory, both have similar capacity and the performance of the "Consumer" devices oftentimes is better than that of the "Industrial" type. On top of that, the "Industrial" SSDs typically cost more than twice than the "Consumer" ones. So what is the difference ??????

The answer is, however, quite elaborate. Industrial SSDs and Flash Cards are manufactured with the sole focus of providing superior reliability. This focus drives every facet of product development, from design considerations, component selection, test methodology, product tracking and Failure Analysis. Lets have a more detailed understanding:

Design Considerations

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