TDK Launches SDS1B Series SSDs

TDK is a company that I haven’t thought of in years, actually many years as I don’t think I’ve seen the name since the time of audio cassettes (MC), but they’re still around and still producing a lot of products in various regions of the electronic sectors. One of their newest products is a SATA III SSD built around their own in-house SSD controller, the SDS1B series of SSDs.

TDK developed their own controller for this drive, working from the base of their old controllers. The new GBDriver GS1 NAND flash controller features the recovery and refresh functions of the old controllers as well as a power interruption tolerance algorithm and integrated power supply protection circuit; it will work with both MLC and SLC NAND flash memory.

The new SSDs presented here come without a DRAM or other type of cache, meaning they will run slower than what we’re used to from consumer class drives. The new product can achieve read access speeds up to 440 MB/s and write access speeds up to 240 MB/s with MLC and up to 340 with SLC flash.

These drives are intended for embedded and industrial applications and reliability is more of an issue than the extra speed. Each feature and chip added to something is another part that can fail and stop the drive from functioning and by not adding a caching function, TDK eliminates one more of these.

TDK SDS1B features include global static wear leveling algorithm for the entire drive and improved power interruption tolerance with an internal power supply protection circuit to prevent collateral data errors. The auto-refresh function reads all data including little-used data and automatically performs error correction (ECC) when needed and TDK also added a function for specifying a data range and completely deleting all data in it. The drives feature AES 128/265-bit hardware encryption and also TDK’s proprietary security function that requires mutual authentication from both host and SSD. SMART and TRIM are also present as it should be on any drive.

TDK will demonstrate the drive at the Embedded Systems Expo (ESEC) to be held in Tokyo this week and the new products will be available from August 2015.