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Domain: adtron.com

Stories and comments across the archive that link to adtron.com.

Comments · 10

  1. Re:I thought flash went bad over time by LighterShadeOfBlack · · Score: 1 · on BitMicro Takes Wraps Off 832 GB Flash Drive

    but if these drives/chips are solid state with no moving parts what is there to "wear out" ? can this be fixed or is it a design flaw ? I'm not a solid-state expert or anything, but as far as I know it is an inherent limitation of the technology, so it is not something that can be fixed without moving to another technology (and there are several future technologies waiting in the wings which don't seem to have this issue, eg. MRAM). Instead of trying to explain it poorly myself, I'll just steal a whole chunk out of this 'Flash Quality' summary [PDF]:

    Write Endurance
          The one common issue of concern to most media designers is write endurance. Media write integrity
          of a flash device now greatly exceeds that of a magnetic disk drive; however this comparison is rarely
          acknowledged.
          Data is stored on a flash device by the injection and depletion of a charge on a floating gate. Each time
          a write or erase operation occurs, there is an infinitesimal breakdown of the oxide layer on the floating
          gate that holds the data bit charge. This phenomenon doesn't occur in a read operation. This slow
          breakdown eventually degrades the cell where it does not allow an exchange of a charge and can no
          longer be erased or written to. In early years of flash technology "Write Endurance" was limited to
          only a few thousand cycles but over the years semiconductor manufacturers have improved this
          technology where typical limits of a flash cell endurance now vary between 300,000 and 2 million
          erase/write cycles depending on the technology.
  2. Re:Data recovery from SSDs? by koyangi · · Score: 1 · on Solid State Drives - Fast, Rugged, and Expensive

    All of the companies that make military grade drives have some secure erase feature. Here is the description from the Adtron website. Most even have some way to physically destroy the circuitry as well, leaving the device totally unusable (and in some cases unrecognizable). I am not sure that they sell the "destruct" feature to the general public, but most have it. It became very popular after the EP-3 incident.

  3. Re:What about maximum read/writes for flash? by Klaruz · · Score: 1 · on Seagate Announces First Hybrid Hard Drive

    First google result: http://www.adtron.com/products/A25fb-SerialATAFlas hDisk.html

    Flash drives have been used in embeded stuff for a while now.

  4. Server performance of 2.5" drives - look out! by jlseagull · · Score: 2, Informative · on Notebook Hard Drive Roundup

    Don't use these for servers. The 10KRPM SAS 2.5" drives are the only ones in the 2.5" form factor that don't crawl into a hole and die under enterprise loads. All of these drives are meant to function on a 30% or less duty cycle in a laptop. Sure, a nice inexpensive 2.5" SATA/ATA drive may be the best in terms of energy/IOP, energy/GB transferred, and $/IOP, but performance declines at .7% a week when running enterprise loads of short random seeks. This was the rule across all mfrs. and drives I tested, from 4200 RPM to 7200 RPM. Drives begin to die after three weeks - even with adequate cooling. All three drive designers and both system designers I talked to said that they're simply not meant to be run in a server.

    Oh, and want killer IOPS with microsecond seek times? Try the Adtron SATA flash drive. 40GB will only set you back $18,000. :)

  5. Re:No SATA? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting · on Samsung Announces Flash-Based Disk Drive

    [shamelessplug]

    This is not news. My employer, Adtron, has been doing flash based "disk" and "tape" drives for years. And we were the first (and only?) with SATA: http://www.adtron.com/products/A25fb-SerialATAFlas hDisk.html

    [/shamelessplug]

    Samsung announces and everyone goes gaga. Little guys do it for years and no one seems to know about it. [shrug]

  6. Host invisible RAID 1 anyone? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on Mirroring Controllers - What have been Your Experiences?
    How about this drive here. Obviously designed for industrial application, being CompactPCI and all. However, it seems to me that a storage system that exposes one "drive" to the host computer and handles all the RAID functions internally. The host uses a standard SCSI host adapter.

    Has anyone used such a product?

    Would something like this be good in a desktop/workstation?

    How about an ATA version? Does one exist?

  7. Re:You'll be rolling your own by DancingSword · · Score: 3, Informative · on Low-powerered Ethernet Hard Drive?

    Embedded Linux mag used to have micro ( smaller than mini-itx ) motherboard from ZFLinux.com, but now they sell system-on-chip thingys, so maybe that'd be a bit too much hacking...

    here's one 2.7 inches by 1.6 inches, it has an IDE interface and a 486sx...

    Ah HA! Gotcha!
    LinuxDevices.com:Top:Hardware:Boards:Single-board computers HERE.

    Right, so that takes care-of the motherboard, so to use a flash-card or micro-drive, you need either anATA-to-CF adapter,
    or, if you need more than a pair of 2GB CF cards, maybe one of these flash-disks ( ATA, SCSI, PC/104? that's what the ZF boards were called! ),
    or you can get an all-in-one IDE MicroFlash Card from MagicRam.com,
    or dig Dan's Data's review of the VME CF-IDE adapter ( neat that it can run as either ATA-master OR ATA-slave, unlike the competition, so you could get 4GB of 'drive', or RAID-1 2GB, it's what I'd choose, if they do actually do this... ).

    Then get a Lexar CF-card ( up-to 6MB/s, no motor ), up to 1GB 32x or 2GB 40x, or put a MicroDrive on it, and you'll have a VERY mini machine you can FTP to ( probably be able to stick Gentoo on it, if going for a 486-SoC ), if you have to limit everything for power, you may need to limit the amount of RAM on it, when it's in its final config...

    Just ideas, I don't do this stuff day-in-day-out, so I don't know how you'd get it connected to your magnetic-instrument, but I hope this helps..

  8. Re:Write wear and write speed by adzoox · · Score: 1 · on Enterprise-class ATA Drives
    No actually there is a higher quality 5-10ns type of flash RAM called SRAM, it's not SDRAM and it's not Flash RAM (as used in smartmedia or compact flash) - I'm not 100% sure about this, but I think the new XD picture cards use a type of SRAM.

    Check out ADTRON

  9. How drives could be faster & more reliable . . by adzoox · · Score: 2, Interesting · on Enterprise-class ATA Drives
    I honestly do not see why things are not moving quicker towards Flash ATA or Flash SCSI or Flash Firewire 800 for that matter.

    Memory is 10x more reliable and more shock resistant. It is also nanoseconds rather than milliseconds and doesn't take NEARLY the power or the "pixie dust" to produce.

    A company called ADTRON makes SCSI 2.5" Flash drives. I bought one used on eBay (1 gig) about three weeks ago. I put it in a PowerBook Duo (1995 laptop). The Duo now lasts as long as a modern iBook and the difference is between night and day in App launch, speed, and most unforseen, graphics display. It appeared as if I had almost doubled processor speed.

    If you want to see if I'm telling the truth. Look for SCSI Flash or IDE Flash 2.5" drives on eBay and try it in your laptop for a day. There are regularly 350 meg IDE laptop drives for sale. Right now the capacities are capped at 4 gig (and the price on one is $4600) But if WD, Seagate, Maxtor and all the other platter people would just get with the program I'm sure we could have MUCH smaller drives than current systems, with much denser capacities than even today.

    I don't see why laptop manufacturers don't push this very hard. Battery life is almost doubled (no moving parts) and it almost eliminates the bottleneck that laptop hard drives have. As for desktops, you could have 4 of these drives in the space of one and possibly have them raided!

  10. Other IDE-to-CompactFlash devices by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on Linux on a FlashCard: home project
    Gee, a single web search ( Google ) and I find other devices. Can a mammal be trained to search for "CompactFlash IDE adapter"?

    Adtron's fits in a drive bay.

    How about a Texas Micro Pentium single board computer with CompactFlash?

    Here is a CF-to-IDE converter for mounting on a PC/104 stack. $150.

    And here are three more from Advantech including an IDE CompactFlash module.

    M-Systems also has IDE CompactFlash disks.

    Anyone know if the following are OS dependent?

    Instead of an ISA IDE/FD card, this PC Card/FD card. Or this 4-card PC Card ISA card.

    Keep in mind that flash can only be written to 300,000 times or so. Avoid swapping to it, and probably best to not update file access times ("atime").