Military Flash Storage Requirements

The Military environment has some of the most challenging environmental and specialty requirements for flash storage devices. The Cactus Industrial products are designed to meet these tough challenges - Where Failure Is Not an Option!!

Environmental concerns range from extreme hot to extreme cold conditions, high shock and vibration and use in harsh, sometimes unclean surroundings.

The Cactus off the shelf extended temperature products have operating temperature ranges from -45C to 90C. We have also screen tested well beyond these temperature ranges to meet specific customer needs.

From a Shock and Vibration perspective, most of our products offer a 3000G operational shock rating and 30G peak to peak vibration, exceeding some the most taxing applications requirements.

Polluted and filthy situations require a flash storage device which is sometimes removable to remain functional. In these cases, a good general rule of thumb would be to conformal coat the PCB and components, thereby offering protection against moisture, dust and chemicals. Conformal coating is available on all Cactus products.

Finally, when data is at risk of being compromised, there is a need for specific erasure algorithms to quickly and/or thoroughly wipe out data. Many of the Cactus products offer generic and Military spec erasure features to perform this task.

Many of the security features are shown below, but if a custom requirement is needed, Cactus is able to create a special version of the product.

ATA Security Feature Set:

• Set/Disable Password, Security Lock/Unlock, etc.

CTPurge™: Generic Erase Options:

• Erase Only
• Erase and Overwrite with random data once
• Erase and overwrite with random data N times

CTPurge™: Erase Options according to:

• USA-AF AFSSI 5020 specification
• USA Navy NAVSO P-5239-26 specification
• DoD 5220.22-M specification
• NSA Manual 130-2 specification
• USA-Army 380-19 specification
• NISPOMSUP Chap.8, Sect.8-501 specification
• IREC (IRIG) 106 specification
• Others upon customer request

This blog post touches on several of the top items needed in the military market. If you would like to discuss further please contact a Cactus Expert to assist.