Apro Hermes-I Series SLC 6Gb SATA CFast Card With Toshiba Industrial NAND and Maxiotek Controller

APRO Co. Ltd. announces Hermes-I Series SLC SATA III CFast card which is designed with industrial SLC NAND flash IC in order to meet the demand of high endurance for small files full-time transferring in the industrial and embedded system.

The card uses Maxiotek Corporation (formerly JMicron) controller and Toshiba Memory Corporation ‘s NAND SLC Flash IC, providing the sequential R/W speeds of 330MB/s and 190MB/s, and 4K random R/W speeds at 11,500/14,200 IO/s.

In addition to complementing SLC NAND flash IC, the firmware of Hermes-I Series SLC SATA III CFast card is designed with below technologies to ensure the reliability and increase the lifespan for NAND flash IC on heavy workload:

• ECC: Error Correcting Code (40 bits per 1,024 bytes) is used to examine if the data is correct while transferring. When the system shows error, ECC can protect the system to operate functionally by correcting the error automatically or request the system to re-transfer the data and keep the system away from the crash.

• Power Loss Data Protection: In order to ensure that the last R/W command can be completed, the power loss data protection will immediately stop reading or writing command when it senses the unstable power or insufficient wattage. Therefore, the data can be safely and completely saved in the CFast card. Once the power is restored, the system will move on with the process.

• Static Wear Leveling: static wear leveling is used to prevent the updating static data from staying in the static area and makes blocks fully and evenly applied, then each block can have the same usability. The static data includes OS files, lookup table, running files, etc.

• Garbage Collection and TRIM: It has the direct influence on performance and lifespan of CFast card. The CFast card must use garbage collection and TRIM to reduce the amount of garbage collected in order to decrease the unnecessary wear and maintain the lifespan.

• SMART: The card supports SMART command set (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology). The users will know the health condition of CFast card from SMART. It can predict the lifespan of CFast card, and collect the data to know the degree of CFast card usage, letting users change the new product at the proper time. Or, you can also provide the relevant data to the firm’s engineer to do the technical analysis, and the company will offer the effective solution.

In order to match up the SATA interface in current industrial motherboard, Hermes-I Series SLC SATA III CFast card uses SATA interface and replace the traditional CF card which is designed with PATA (Parallel ATA or so-called IDE) interface. It is compliant with CFast 2.0 specification, ATA/ATAPI-7 protocol standard and is designed with CFast Type I with 7-pin data and 17-pin power connectors. Combining CF card’s form factor and SATA interface makes Hermes-I Series card a solution under the conditions of small form factor and harsh environment.

Hermes-I Series SLC SATA III CFast also conforms to the SATA 3.0 (6.Gb/s) specification with low power consumption and is the ideal option for industrial application, but provides compatibilty with 3Gb/s and 1.5Gb/s interface.

In addition, in order to ensure the reliability of quality and ability in different environment temperatures, the company chooses the specific components to conform to the standard of the industrial system. Hermes-I Series card is designed to be used not only in the standard temperature 0°C ~ +70°C, but also in wide temperature -40°C ~ +85°C. Moreover, the company applies the conformal coating to the PCBA of CFast card to consolidate the abilities of moisture, dirt, and dust prevention and chemical pollution. The conformal coating can also avoid the corrosion from soldering, becoming an isolation and eliminating the electromagnetic interference.

The capacities are available from 4, 16, 32, and 64GB. The card is suitable as a storage for small files random R/W as well as a solution as a booting disk .

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