Small drives to meet compatibility standards
Small drives to meet compatibility standards
Following the recent growth in popularity and availability of disk drives for small devices, standards are now being created to ensure that this small drives can be used in many different handheld systems.
The MultiMediaCard Association has created a liaison agreement with the Consumer-Advanced Technology Attachment Promoter Group to create standardised disk drive interfaces.
This has happened after industry consensus concluded that the existing disk drive interfaces built around desktop PC and large storage device applications are unsuitable for the next generation devices such as mobile handsets and audio/video players.
Scott Herbert, the executive director of the MMCA, said: "We see this liaison work as a way to introduce strong hard drive solutions to portable consumer applications. The fast MMC interface described in our MMC System Specification ver 4.1 is optimum for this because it is designed for mobile environments, and so offers best in class combination of high performance, low voltage, low pin count, resolvability, and high level protocol with good security support."
MMCA is made up of 14 companies from around the world, including HP, Nokia, Samsung and Sanyo. The CE-ATA Promote Group is made up of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Intel Corporation, Nokia, Seagate and Toshiba. So the collaboration should have plenty of clout.
Knut Grimsrud, the chairman of the CE-ATA Promoter Group and Intel senior principal engineer, added: "Cooperation between the CE-ATA and MMCA organisations creates new opportunities for a highly optimal storage interface solution for portable consumer applications.
"By working together, we can deliver a solution that only provides the best solution for highly integrated storage devices, but also provides the greatest degree of interoperability and compatibility with the MMCA technology.
"The CE-ATA specification builds on MMCA technology that will be used as the underlying communication interface."
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