Industrial Grade mSATA (MO-300) - A Reliable High Speed Embedded Storage Solution

mSATA (Mini-SATA) is also referred to by its JEDEC specification of MO-300. At 50.8mm x 29.85mm the mSATA delivers a lot of capacity in a small footprint. The standard can support SATA interface performance at 1.5 Gbits/sec, 3.0 Gbits/sec and 6.0 Gbits/sec speeds.

The mSATA electrical specification follows the SATA-IO (Serial ATA International Organization) Group’s specifications laid out in September 2009. In January 2010, JEDEC also published the MO-300 standard which defines the dimensions, layout and connector position of this product as well.

Cactus offers both an Industrial Grade mSATA, based on SLC NAND flash, for the most demanding embedded application environments and a Industrial MLC mSATA, based on MLC NAND, which provides a cost effective solution for less demanding applications.

The mainstream Netbooks and tablets frequently use mSATA as their storage medium. Some notebooks use a smaller capacity mSATA as a cache in front of a hard disk drive to speed up the most often used data. Industrial applications use mSATA to run operating systems and applications as well as store data.

Industrial mSATA are built using SLC (Single Level Cell) NAND. They have >2 Million endurance cycles per logical block which is more than enough for reliably running an operating system and high write cycle applications. Longer life cycles are another plus for these products since SLC NAND components are available for several years without change.

Commercial mSATA are built using the lower cost MLC (Multi Level Cell) NAND components. They generally are reliable when running an operating system at room temperature, but may have issues at extreme high and low temperatures. For high write cycle applications, it is recommended to move to the Industrial Grade products using higher endurance memory.