SMART Modular Technologies announces M.2 SATA SSD

SMART Modular Technologies has announced the new M.2 SATA XR+ with SafeDATA power loss protection technology. SMART Modular Technologies, part of the larger SMART consortium of companies, is a privately-held company that has been in the electronics industry for over 25 years. Their products are usually confined to the OEM market, where they create custom designs for varying applications. The double-sided M.2 design is available in capacities from 32 to 512GB. These SSDs are designed to meet the needs of Tier 1 OEM customers and sport sequential read/write speeds of 540/320 MB/s.

SafeDATA consists of power loss detection and hold-up circuitry, in addition to advanced controller firmware, to flush all data to the underlying NAND in the event of a host power loss event. Power loss protection is a critical requirement in enterprise and embedded applications, and fusing that functionality onto a slim M.2 design opens up new applications for the dense design. The product is sampling now, and volume production begins in Q1 of 2015.

M.2 designs avail themselves well to several applications, and datacenter-centric models are appearing with more frequency. We expect to have samples of data-centric M.2 designs soon, and in the interim check out our library of competitive performance analysis of the latest and greatest enterprise storage technology in our IT/Datacenter section.