Smart Introduces SATA SSDs

By Greg McNevin

August 8, 2007: In a sign of the increasing popularity of solid state disk (SSD) storage systems, Smart Modular Technologies has introduced a new range of serial ATA (SATA) SSDs.

Aimed at networking, telecommunications and data communications applications as well as tablet PCs, the company says its new XceedLite drives offer some of the lowest power consumption at 0.55W for reads and 0.65W for writes.

The company pitches the drives as direct replacements for traditional magnetic storage, and being solid state the drives are naturally more rugged while offering typical high performance of 40MB/sec 25MB/sec sustained read and write.

The 32GB drives also feature access times of 200ms, on-board error detection as well as correction and a snappy wear levelling algorithm that the company says provides “consistent operation throughout the product life cycle.”

The company uses single level cell NAND Flash technology, which it claims is more robust than other comparable multi-level cell technology by a factor of 10X in reliability and 2X in speed. It says this enables it to achieve more than 2 million program/erase cycles for most applications.

“The XceedLite product line is the next logical step in our SATA SSD roadmap, providing a low-cost, low-power alternative for OEMs,” said Alan Gulachenski, Senior Director of New Product Development. “SMART is able to offer these rugged new drives at a cost that is competitive with traditional HDD-based designs.”

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