STEC ATA or SATA Flash Drive in Tiny One-Inch Form Factor

STEC, Inc. announced the MACH4 1-inch SSD — the industry’s smallest, highest reliability and lowest power-consuming SSD. STEC’s new MACH4 platform enables system designers to reduce the footprint and power requirements of designs, providing unprecedented design flexibility and enabling new product categories.

"For the numerous applications which were historically challenged by the severe limitations of 1-inch hard disk drives (HDD), STEC is now offering a much more cost-effective, higher capacity and higher reliability alternative in an easy-to-implement solution," said Patrick Wilkison, vice president of marketing and business development. "The MACH4 1-inch SSD family offers a compelling combination of speed, reliability and form factor, all in an integrated storage device, thus enabling an entirely new wave of applications. The drive’s unique blend of attributes makes it an ideal solution for applications ranging from blade servers to ultra-mobile PCs to various other small format devices which require the highest throughput in the smallest package."

Leveraging STEC’s proprietary controller technology, the MACH4 utilizes multiple Flash channels enabling throughput speeds faster than 90MB/s, making it the fastest, highest capacity, and most reliable compact storage solution on the market. The drive supports widely utilized interfaces, both native SATA and PATA, allowing OEMs to easily integrate the drive within systems. The MACH4 was designed to address a massive void in available storage technologies, due to the inability of HDDs to scale capacity in the 1-inch form factor in a cost effective manner.

Ultra-Compact Footprint
Optimized for embedded OEM applications, the MACH4 1-inch SSD’s ultra-compact footprint and small form factor meet the needs of highly space-constrained applications. Ideal applications include GPS/navigation solutions, automotive entertainment systems, interactive kiosks, and ultra-portable notebooks which require the smallest possible storage solutions that, until now, lacked the right levels of performance, capacity and cost.

Cohesive Design Enables Broad Usage
The MACH4 1-inch SSD helps OEMs embrace NAND as a replacement for small form factor HDD as it comes as a cohesive unit (reliability and performance are all built-in). The drive enables wider usage of solid state storage by removing the difficulties associated with designing-in NAND-based memory and delivers unprecedented speed, with unrivaled reliability, ease of integration all in small form factor. As the HDD manufacturers focus only on increasing capacity on the 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch HDD form factors, the ultra-small form factor category of drives is not evolving. The MACH4 is ideally suited to meet the needs of this blossoming category.

MACH4 Features
Speed: The MACH4 boasts four independent flash channels for ultra-fast speeds with sustained sequential 90MB/s reads and 55MB/s writes
Reliability: The industry’s most elaborate and effective Flash management capabilities ensuring long product life through built-in wear leveling and bad block management, full data-path protection with built-in 8-bit ECC engine, and built-in power-down data protection
Security: AES encryption in hardware, write-protect, and data purge
Standard Interfaces: SATA and ATA

The drive has Commercial and Industrial Operating Temperature Range and provides lower power, reduced latency, and faster boot times compared to traditional hard disks.

Pricing and Availability
The MACH4 SSD is expected to be available in mass production at the end of April in capacities up to 32GB. Projected OEM pricing for the 8GB capacity point is $45.

STEC, Inc.