Year: 2014
The Conflict Minerals are tantalum, tin, tungsten and gold (collectively known as the 3TGs). In the US, the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act created legislation in an effort to eliminate Conflict Minerals which originate in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and surrounding countries. The concern is 3TGs mined and transported within this region directly or indirectly...
There are four main families of SD Card products with three related to memory devices. The SD interface has become the go to interface for most consumer devices and it's making some inroads to the industrial flash storage market as well. SD refers to the original Standard Capacity SD Card. SDHC refers to SD High...
Cactus Technologies welcomes you to visit our booth at embedded world Exhibition & Conference 2014. The exhibition is being held next week, from February 25 – 27, 2014 at the Exhibition Centre Nuremberg in Nürnberg, Germany. Around 900 exhibitors are presenting state-of-the-art technology in all facets of embedded technologies, from construction elements, modules and complete...
NAND flash memory is the building block of almost every solid-state flash storage device today. A limitation of NAND flash is the number of erase cycles per block. Since erasing blocks of NAND is required prior to writing over existing data, this translates into limited write “endurance” cycles. Current SLC NAND has a raw endurance...
Recently Solid State Drives (SSD) are being used in place of some traditionally Hard Disk Drive (HDD) applications such as desktops, notebooks and enterprise storage systems. Both SSD and HDD appear and function similar from the outside, but let’s compare some key differences between the two technologies.HDD were invented in the mid-1950s by IBM. While...
I was recently asked to explain how Cactus can specify >2M Endurance cycles per block for our Industrial Grade Flash Storage products when the underlying SLC NAND flash memory is only rated at 50K to 100K endurance cycles. Here’s my response.The specification of >2 Million endurance cycles per logical block is an Industry standard specification for Industrial...
SMART (often represented as S.M.A.R.T.) stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology. Its purpose is to report specific data from rotating Hard Disk Drives (HDD) and Solid State Drives (SSD) related to the reliability of the device. This data can then be analyzed to anticipate potential failures in the near future and predict the remaining...
Industrial applications requiring the highest reliability, a small physical size and low pin count interface are well served by Industrial Grade versions of SD interface flash devices. The vast majority of SD interface flash products in the market are consumer level products – basically great for a mobile phone, but not very reliable in an...
When searching for flash storage devices many specifications can be used to make a decision. In this post I will review maximum and sustained transfer rate specs that are important, but in many cases not indicative of the results you will actually see in your application. The maximum bus speed and sustained read and write...
