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Storage Products

Comparing Industrial Flash Devices to Other Storage Media

Choosing the right storage device means understanding the requirements of your application. Your choices are an industrial flash disk or magnetic media, which includes hard disks and tape drives. Where reliability and durability are major concerns, industrial flash disks are the best choice. Consider the basic storage functions when selecting the right storage device for your application.

There are five basic functions that storage performs:

• Booting the operating system
• Loading the application software
• Storing and retrieving data
• Backup and restoring the OS and data
• Installing the OS and applications

There are four basic storage technologies: hard disk drives (HDDs), Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks (RAID), Industrial Flash disks and CD/DVDs. The table below illustrates the functions each type of media is suitable for.

Functions by Media Type
	Boot OS	Load App	Data Store	Backup	Restore	Install
Hard Disk
RAID
Flash Disk
CD/DVD

Essentially, an industrial flash disk is suitable for the same types of functions as a hard disk and a RAID configuration, depending on the environmental circumstances and the need for the highest reliability available today. Generally speaking, it is cost prohibitive to use industrial quality solid state disks for backup, restore, and install functions. In certain industries, such as telecom or defense applications, there may be some exceptions to this rule.

Early in the design cycle, planning the data storage element in relation to the system requirements can, over the field life of the system, mean the difference between disk requalification or the re-engineering the system interface or host software to implement a new hard disk drive. Much of the capital equipment in the field typically has a useful life of 20 to 25 years - while a hard drive has a much shorter life cycle. By planning ahead and using industrial flash drives the life of the equipment can be extended, costs and maintenance can be reduced, and the total cost of ownership can be controlled.

For instance, the mechanical dampeners that reduce the fragility of traditional hard drives are built to the specific weight and dimensions for that particular drive. As time goes on and the drive in use becomes dated, new drives are required that may not fit the old mounts and dampeners may not provide sufficient vibration reduction due to changes in disk drive weight. Implementing industrial flash devices avoids these potential problems because solid state disks do not require mechanical dampeners.

The graphic below compares the life cycle of a system in which a hard disk solution is implemented versus the life cycle of a disk drive.

There are many changes to a HDD before it is even out of production, causing an inordinate amount of requalification and re-engineering at the systems level. Matching production life of the system to that of the storage device and the ongoing support provide by the storage vendor is an critical part of selecting the storage element at the design phase of your system.

Legacy hardware is only one part of the overall discussion of the system life of industrial flash products. Consider that Adtron SmartStorage framework allows the implementation of new technology to extend the life of systems in production and in the field. "Systems" in this discussion refers to capital equipment that has a useable field life of 20 to 25 years. Examples of these include robot controllers, jacquard looms, factory automation systems, etc. "Legacy" is a term to describe a system in the field, but new products such as industrial flash disks are used to extend these system's lives, as well as to avoid some of the pitfalls of the hard disk drive's life cycle.

To learn more about Adtron's industrial flash drives and rigorous testing contact us today.