Stec Reveals Enterprise MACH16 Slim SATA SSD

STEC, Inc. announced that its enterprise-class MACH16 SSD technology now extends to the embedded market in a small solid-state form factors.

The MACH16 Slim SATA SSD provides embedded system designers with the same flash management technology as STEC’s enterprise SSDs. The device leverages industry-standard 22-pin SATA cabling (supporting JEDEC MO-297 and SFF-8156 specifications) and provides the high data integrity, endurance and reliability. With these features, it is suited for high-performance and rugged embedded systems.

Where size and power consumption are concerned, the MACH16 Slim SATA is a drop-in replacement for a 2.5-inch rotating hard disk drive, or even a traditional 2.5-inch SSD. This SATA-based solution, which enables system designers to shrink the total storage footprint by 60 percent, consumes up to 70 percent less power than an HDD or conventional SSD. This combination of compact design and low power consumption supports the industry trend toward commercial, off-the-shelf, small-format system boards (e.g., Mini-ITX, Pico-ITX and CompactPCI) targeted for next-generation OEM embedded designs.

"We estimate that the market for intelligent embedded systems is over 1.8 billion units and over $1 trillion in revenue today, and will double to nearly 4 billion units and over $2 trillion in revenue by 2015," said Jeff Janukowicz, research director for solid-state storage at IDC. "The MACH16 Slim SATA SSD will anchor STEC’s embedded solid-state portfolio, and is a well-positioned solution for embedded system designers who require true enterprise SSD technology in a small industry-standard format."

The MACH16 Slim SATA embedded SSD leverages STEC’s patented SSD controller and firmware technologies that help optimize performance, endurance, data integrity and reliability.

Same advanced flash management capabilities
as STEC’s enterprise SSDs, including:

• CellCare Technology, which uses a combination of flash management techniques, digital signal processing, ECC methods, and other technologies to increase NAND cell endurance and data retention, as well as performance.
• Secure Array of Flash Elements (SAFE) Technology, which improves reliability by providing mechanisms to recover from NAND flash page-, block-, die- and chip-failures, improving the MTBF and the Mean Time To Data Loss (MTTDL).
• PowerSafe Technology, which provides instant backup and recovery in the event of an unplanned power failure.
• Data-path protection and advanced error code correction, which protects critical data from corruption.
• Advanced wear-leveling, which spreads the writing of each data block evenly across all data blocks to maintain consistent and even use of the NAND blocks so that one block location does not wear out faster than any other block location inside of the device.

"Our new MACH16 Slim SATA SSD brings the critical features of our proven enterprise-class SSDs to embedded platforms," said STEC chairman and CEO Manouch Moshayedi. "System designers no longer have to settle for consumer-grade products for their mission-critical and ruggedized applications. They can now trust their data to the MACH16 Slim SATA SSDs."

The MACH16 Slim SATA embedded SSDs are available, with user capacities of 25 and 50GB.

These devices support sustained performance up to 245MB/s for sequential 128K read operations, and up to 150MB/s for sequential 128K write operations. As a result, they are suited for a range of embedded applications that includes network and telecommunication systems, military vehicles, rugged PCs, gaming systems, digital signage, transportation systems, ATM machines, kiosks, point-of-sale machines, cash registers, printers, GPS systems, vehicle infotainment systems, data loggers and medical equipment.