Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Solid-state drive handles harsh environments
In applications where shock and vibration are a concern, the industry’s transition from rotating storage to solid state drives is on the fast track. Joining this transition, Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing recently introduced the XMC/PMC-550 solid state drive card for media storage in harsh environments found in the aerospace and defense market. The XMC/PMC-550 NAND Flash solid state drive provides up to 32 Gbytes of disk space in an XMC (VITA 42.3) or PMC (IEEE1386.1) mezzanine card form factor for easy integration into VME, VPX, and CompactPCI systems. It is available in configurations of 8, 16, or 32 Gbytes and is visible to the system as two independent Serial ATA drives. Using multi-tasking technology, the XMC/PMC-550 delivers data transfer rates of up to 30 Mbytes/sec for simultaneous read to each drive. Error correction codes can correct up to 8 random single-bit error per 512-byte sector. It also supports wear leveling that spreads program/erase cycles evenly across the media to mitigate premature device failure due to frequent erase cycles on the same block of Flash memory. The XMC/PMC-550 can also support hardware write protect as an enhanced level of security to prevent unintentional data overwrite. The XMC/PMC-550 is interoperable with most host and carrier cards that feature support for XMC or PMC cards for popular operating systems including VxWorks and Linux. Pricing for the XMC/PMC-550 starts at $2,495. You can read more about the transition to solid state drives in Brian Dipert’s recent EDN article entitled “Solid-state drives challenge hard disks”.
ADVERTISEMENT
© Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.