Tweaktown.com attended last week’s Flash Memory Summit and has published some great photos of the internals of the 2.5-inch SMART Storage 1.6Tbyte Optimus SSD. The drive has dual SAS ports with accompanying specs of 1Gbps sequential read and 500MGbps sequential write speeds using consumer-grade MLC (multi-level cell) NAND Flash memory.
An image of the guts of the drive (opened like a butterflied fish fillet) reveal two important facts. First, SMART Storage has designed its own SSD controller, putting it in good company with several other SSD vendors that have also decided to design their own controllers including Skyera, which I wrote about last week. The SMART Storage SSD controller is based on what the company calls the “Guardian Technology Platform,” consisting of:
- FlashGuard, a technology that applies Flash-management and signal-processing techniques to improve the endurance of MLC NAND Flash.
- DataGuard, which adds error correction to the SSD’s internal data paths.
- EverGuard, a power-loss protection mechanism using capacitive energy storage.
Second, you can see from the image that the drive requires a 2-board assembly to hold 1.6Tbytes of Flash memory. The two boards appear to be joined with flex cables.
For more information about the Skyera Skyhawk announcement, see
Want to know Rado Danilak’s and Skyera’s plan for total enterprise-class SSD world domination?
44Tbyte Skyera Skyhawk SSD employs Everspin MRAM as write cache
Denali Memory Report 