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Saitech Inc. joined the celebration with Western Regional Minority Supplier Development Council on 41 incredible years of working to equalize the treatment of minority business owners and diverse communities in Northern California, Nevada, and Hawai‘i. Saitech Inc. enjoyed the music, awards presentation, and dinner. WRMSDC creates a synergy between Corporate Members and Minority Business Enterprises to form possible business relationships for the future.

We want to congratulate all the winners and sponsors while celebrating our diverse culture within the WRMSDC!

Recently, as PC performance and the requirements for all related parts have increased embedded system architects have had a goal of  minimizing current and future design risks, lowering product life-cycle cost through module scalability, interchangeability and planning smooth transition from legacy to legacy-free interfaces while allowing room for growth.

Compatibility concern

To deal with this issue manufacturers have added SATA on the board as an option, but designers are not able to take advantage of the SATA technology  at this level due to the lack of incompatible approaches and standards. The use of a single HDD could  have a high chance of failure.

Four Logical Options

Compact Flash (CF)

USB Flash Disk Module

Disk On Chip

SATA Module

The embedded storage market has many storage devices which are considered as “industrial grade” while many are actually consumer-grade devices. They are then repackaged and marketed as industrial embedded SSDs even though they lack most of what the devices should have.

Essential Features

There are many features that are required to meet the enhanced reliability needed by industrial-embedded systems that consumer-grade devices simply don’t have. Some essential features to look for are:

• Support of advanced flash management.

• Integration of power-fail corruption mitigation technologies.

• Backed with extensive design and reliability testing.

Proprietary Firmware

A proprietary firmware allows for:

• Firmware fine tuning which allows for teams to see and correct any issues with the firmware for better overall performance.
• Timely bug fixes- so that the problems between the customer and the supplier can be fixed faster.
• Implementation of advanced flash management features.
• Designing customer specific applications.
• Compatibility with nontraditional operating systems so customers have a broad range of support for their applications.

Testing, Screening, and a Strong Manufacturing Relationship 

The embedded SSDs must have hardware designs with self-testing and screening methods that are fit for high-volume manufacturing. The test programs are used to uncover inherent flash media weaknesses. These weaknesses can be fixed with firmware changes and more sophisticated flash management features.

Quality Components

The components are chosen based on quality and product longevity. Components that have long product life-cycles and a clear migration path to their replacements must be identified. It can be costly and time-consuming to frequently qualify and re-qualify drives. So,the longer a component will be supported and produced, the better.

With the constant need for stricter data protection laws and regulations, businesses are grasping the importance of properly securing their data to avoid high penalties and cost of data loss. Self-Encrypting Drives or SEDs are storage devices that automatically encrypt data without any user interaction.

AES Encryption

This form of encryption is the standard for  the U.S. government and it is not easy to break. It has been calculated by experts that it would take a billion years to crack an AES key.

Hardware – Based Encryption

TPM is considered the standard as a hardware root of trust for crypto processors, which includes encryption key generation as well as tamper-resistant key storage. With this type of encryption, all bits are encrypted automatically without any user interaction and this provides another level of security against an intrusion.

Authentication

Authentication is a process in which the credentials provided are compared to those on file in a database of authorized users’ information on a local operating system or within an authentication server. If the credentials match, the process is completed and the user is granted authorization for access to the  data.

Sanitization

Various methods of  sanitization are available for organizations based on the level of data protection required. The three different categories of sanitization for media are:Clear, Purge, and Destroy.

Clear

A method of sanitization by applying logical techniques to sanitize data in all user-addressable storage locations for protection against simple non-invasive data recovery techniques using the same interface available to the user; typically applied through the standard read and write commands to the storage device, such as by rewriting with a new value or using a menu option to reset the device to the factory state (where rewriting is not supported).

Purge

A method of sanitization by applying physical or logical techniques that renders Target Data recovery infeasible using state of the art laboratory techniques.

Destroy

A method of sanitization that renders Target Data recovery infeasible using state of the art laboratory techniques and results in the subsequent inability to use the media for storage of data.

ATA Security Erase

The ATA Security command set specifies a SECURITY ERASE UNIT command that erases all accessible user data by writing all binary 0’s or 1’s. It has an ENHANCED ERASE mode that erases all reallocated user data and writes a vendor specific data pattern. Although all data in the user-accessible space is completely erased, some data may still physically reside on the SSD.

Crypto Erase and Secure Erase

When executing a crypto erase, the host can scramble the media encryption key (MEK) via the built-in random number generator or specify a user-generated MEK. This renders the data unreadable almost instantly.

The demand for more secure IoT solutions will give SEDs a strong foothold in the industrial SSD market. SEDs offer these features and provide the best benefits in terms of performance, security, and cost.