Author: Steve Larrivee
Solid State Drive (SSD) encryption is an emerging product feature. The most popular of these encryption methods is AES256. Next month, Cactus will be offering AES256 Encryption on our Industrial Grade SLC 2.5” SATA III SSD and MLC SATA III SSD. The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) was established by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)...
In today’s blog post I’m going to focus on the largest capacity mSATA SSD on the market. Since maximum capacity is not the principal focus of Cactus Technologies, it’s no surprise it is not a Cactus product. This honor goes to Samsung with their 840 EVO mSATA Solid State Drive (SSD). By using 64 of...
mSATA is a small form factor flash storage device which is used like a hard disk drive in a host computer system. The host system must have a specific connector for the mSATA drive to be inserted. As with other flash storage devices, the mSATA can be used to store operating systems, applications and other data. Both...
High performance embedded applications have a simple and reliable embedded flash storage solution in the Slim SATA (MO-297A) form factor. Leveraging the same connector of the 2.5” Solid State Drive (SSD), electrical connection is a snap.Slim SATA is also referred to by its JEDEC specification of MO-297A. With dimensions of 54mm x 39mm the Slim...
I’m often asked how Cactus Technologies differs from SanDisk in the flash storage market. It’s an understandable question because at first glance it appears the products we sell are the same. What is a solid state drive used for is a good starting question. In reality, Cactus rarely competes with SanDisk since there is a wide gap...
The Bill-Of-Material (BOM) for a product is list of all the components and pieces that are needed to build that product. The importance of understanding the BOM is to understand what makes up the part you are buying. For flash storage devices, the BOM includes the list of the controller, flash and other components. It...
SATA is a computer bus specifically for connecting mass storage devices to host systems. SATA stands for Serial ATA and is the follow-on interface to the PATA (Parallel ATA) interface originally designed in 1986. The Serial ATA (SATA) interface was created in 2003 by the Serial ATA Working Group, which was later incorporated as a...
The term Embedded System in general is a computer system that performs a specific function as part of a more elaborate electrical or mechanical system. This differs from the Personal Computer (PC) which is a general purpose computing device that can be used for many different applications. Since many embedded systems perform a very simple...
Many Motherboards, Single Board Computers (SBC) and embedded systems come with a 10-pin USB header to attach external USB connectors. This same header can be used for a low power, rugged and reliable flash storage device called a USB Disk-On-Module (DOM for short). The Universal Serial Bus (USB) interface was originally designed in the mid-1990s to provide...
NAND Flash Memory is a non-volatile memory device which stores blocks as opposed to bytes of data as with NOR flash. It was developed to be lower cost, have improved endurance and read/write performance than NOR flash. Since NAND flash stores more data on the same physical area of silicon, chip densities are increased and...
