Exascend PI3 Industrial Rugged PCIe Gen3 U.2/M.2 Industrial SSD and SI3 6Gb SATA Up to 4TB Industrial SSD

Exascend, Inc. (formerly Memoright) announced the availability of line of thermally optimized, ultra-capacity, high speed and PCIe Gen3 NVMe and SATA3 SSD products based on Marvell Technology Group Ltd.‘s SSD controller.

Exasceng Pi3 Ssd 2.5inch

The company’s PI3 (PCIe Gen3x4) product series are industrial grade (-40°C to 85°C operating temperature) SSD with enterprise performance features (sustain high speed and low latency) available in standard U.2 up to 8TB, M.2 2280 up to 4TB. Legacy part such as SI3 Series (industrial SATA3) are still available with capacity up to 4TB and will be a long-term support item.

Design and optimized for industrial and rugged applications, where unpredictable operating environment, wide temperature fluctuations, thermal and airflow restrictions pose significant design challenges for small form factor, especially when SATA-3 is migrating to PCIe NVMe SSDs; PI3 series products are for incoming merge of AI in IoT, edge server storage, transportation, telemetry, autonomous driving, high-speed video capture and data logging, and other emerging high-performance rugged storage applications where traditional single tasking is now required to do on site multi-tasking and complex high level analytical algorithms.

“The new gen of industrial applications requires lower latency, consistent QoS, and ever increasing sustained high performance under all operation conditions. PI3 SSD product innovates by fusing Exascend enterprise performance storage with proprietary thermal management technology and extended temperature support. With the introduction of our rugged PCIe SSD for rugged applications,” said Frank Chen, CEO, “Exascend is very proud in achieving a significant milestone for the global storage industry. The accelerating trend of flash adoption for rugged applications, industrial automation, edge computing has called upon service focused companies like Exascend to deliver enterprise performance solutions under wide temperature operating conditions – two conflicting requirements by conventional perceptions. By leveraging our deep expertise in SSD technology, Exascend is able to accomplish both requirements simultaneously and advance our mission to push the boundary of possibilities.“

Hardware-based AES-256 encryption engine with TCG OPAL 2.0 support both PI3 and SI3 series products support TCG Opal 2.0, using hardware encryption technology to secure data stored. By encrypting the entire drive, users do not need to worry about their data being accessed if the drive, laptop, or mobile device is stolen or lost.

In addition to PCIe NVMe and SATA-3 features set, the company’s products are engineered with features and optimizations based on proprietary technologies for rugged applications.

Click to enlarge

Adaptive thermal control
The company‘s patented algorithm continuously monitors drive thermals, and regulates drive performance to improve SSD reliability, simultaneously enhancing sustained performance and QoS by 10x. Below a couple examples of performance benchmark in thermal chamber simulating operation temperature under wide temperature range.

The 8TB U.2 provides sustained write performance at 1,500MB/s in temperature range from -40°C~75°C, and sustained write at 950MB/s under high temperature 75°C~85°C.

M.2 is far more challenging as thermal-dissipation is limited in such small form factor, the higher the capacity, the more difficult it gets. Nevertheless, the firm‘s 4TB M.2 can provide a 1,450MB/s sustained write under -40°C~75°C, 700MB/s sustained write at 75°C~85°C.

SATA3 is a matured product in the market, peak performance to reach up to 500MB/s is already a standard spec, but to offer a straight line sustained write at 500MB/s under wide temperature range is company‘s in-house firmware know-how.

Accelerated boot
The company recognizes system responsiveness is a critical aspect of user experience, high capacity flash storage may take minutes to respond after power cycle, negatively impacting responsiveness. Accelerated boot is firm’s technology, by streamlining initialization to prioritize system response, and layering initialization to allow background error correction and recovery, teh vendor achieves near instantaneous drive response upon power on, reducing boot time from minutes to seconds, improving system responsiveness.

Exascend rugged feature suite

Secure firmware update
Tamper proof firmware encryption
Firmware rollback protection
Optional power loss protection
Write protect
pSLC support
Industrial temperature range
Enterprise performance, high QoS, low latency
Fix major BOM (controller/flash/firmware)

Customization service
The platform-based technology enables customization to drive value-add services. The firm provides engineering support on further performance, power, thermal optimizations and security, vendor features on PI3/SI3 products.

Sample available

Optional value-add features