Spartan 2.5 SATA II Solid State Drives

Solid State Drives are being widely deployed in client computing platforms due to optimizations in durability, boot-up time, application performance, responsiveness, and power savings vs. Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). Soligen is utilizing the SandForce™ SF-1200 controllers designed specifically to maximize these SSD benefits with enhanced reliability, performance and security in cost-and power-sensitive computing environments, made possible partly by the highly innovative DuraClass™ technology. By eliminating the need for an external DRAM cache, power, cost and board space is minimized.

Endurance and Longevity

As each generation of Flash memory evolves and the silicon geometries shrink in order to dramatically lower $/GB, the endurance of the individual cells on the die is dropping at a very high rate. Commodity MLC today supports 3-5K program/erase (P/E) cycles while the memory of tomorrow will likely support much less with the benefit of lower cost for broader SSD adoption. DuraWrite™ technology optimizes writes to the Flash memory over conventional controllers, increasing the overall endurance and reliability of the Spartan drive. Highly intelligent block management and wear leveling also extends the overall endurance.

Performance and Power Optimization

Soligen SSDs are technically capable of outperforming traditional rotating hard disk drives, but the limitations of flash memory often require a conventional flash controller to limit the write speed to improve the endurance. In the Spartan Drive, Soligen is utilizing SandForce’s new SF-1200 controllers that do not have this restric­tion. DuraClass technology enables the processor to maximize both the endurance and write performance for the life of the Spartan drive fulfilling the promise of high speed flash memory. In extremely low-power environments, the Spartan can tune total SSD power consumption vs. performance by limiting the number of simultaneously active flash devices. It also supports an ultra-low power mode to maximize battery life.

Mobile Computing Security

DuraClass technology automatically stores data in a highly secure, AES-128 encrypted format. This also prevents would-be thieves from extracting data directly from the flash memory should they ever have access to the drive. An optional disk-level password can be required prior to system boot adding an extra level of data security assurance for confidential information.

Data Protection and Reliability

The Spartan line of 2.5 Solid State Drives provides data protection that surpasses the leading high-performance enterprise HDDs used today. This comes from a combination of superior ECC algorithms with up to 24 bytes protection and the unique RAISE™ (Redundant Array of Independent Silicon Elements) technology. RAISE provides the protection and reliability of RAID on a single drive without the 2x write overhead of parity. This capability is transparent to the end-user.