Solid State Drives

[Goi]

So I was surfing and finding out more about solid state drives(SSD) that use NAND flash, since they seem to be increasing in both speed and capacity. It seems the many of them are still stuck in the old PIO Mode 4/Multiword DMA Mode 2 days, while a new breed are supporting UDMA as well as SATA.

Since the speed of the SSDs are mostly dependent on the flash controller, I was wondering what different IDE flash controllers are out there in the market. From my googling, I've found only a few of UDMA controllers from TDK, KTC and Hitachi, and some of the SSDs actually use their own custom flash controllers. Does anyone know if there are other off-the-shelf IDE flash controllers that do higher UDMA modes or even SATA?

 

[zephyrprime]

Well, the compact flash interface IS a pata ide controller if I recall correctly.

If you want to find contorllers, you may want to go to mouser.com and see if they have any listed.

 

[Goi]

I wasn't talking about compact flash. I'm talking about just solid state drives that use NAND Flash memory in TSOP package or something. These things require a controller chip to interface between the ATA protocol and the NAND flash. There are multi-function controllers that can control both CF and pure NAND flash memory, but so far all those I've found only support slower IDE modes.

 

[Hyperlite]

Originally posted by: zephyrprime
Well, the compact flash interface IS a pata ide controller if I recall correctly.

If you want to find contorllers, you may want to go to mouser.com and see if they have any listed.

i think his point may have been that flash devices are using (s)ata controllers already, so they may just have to be adapted to work with larger devices.