SSDL Provides Rapid Service

A leading defence customer needed replacements for a number of Adtron SDSS-01A SCSI SSD dual card readers in use on aircraft and marine vessels – where the ‘dual’ reflects that each drive had two PCMCIA cards.

Our customer required replacement drives that used Compact Flash instead of PCMCIA cards, which is something we take in our stride. However, this project also required that the cards have logical unit numbers (LUNs) as opposed to our usual RAID 1 approach (which is used by our Hotbackup software for dual CF drives, for example).

Note: LUN is unique identifier for designating individual or a collection of physical or virtual storage devices that execute input/output (I/O) commands with a host computer, as defined by the SCSI standard.

The use of LUN would enable the customer to write data to both cards simultaneously.

All work had to be completed within a tight timeframe to eliminate potential host system downtime.

To save time, we modified an SF250 (2.5″ SCSIFlash SSD) to create a prototype the customer could trial and with which to specify the functional improvement they wanted to have; i.e. improvements over what their Adtron Flash drive could do.

Once aware of all requirements we created custom firmware to work with revised hardware to ensure 100% host compatibility.

Our customer benefited from a quick switchover of drives in the field. And now that our drive is in place, our customer is also enjoying ongoing benefits including the functional improvements they sought plus the increased reliability and reduced power consumption (and noise and heat); benefits that are inherent when switching over to latest technology Flash.

Adtron Drives now able to be directly replaced include

SDDS-01A – Dual Slot, Type II + III Removable Disk Emulation

SDDS-03A – Single Slot, Type III, Removable Disk Emulation

SDDS-04A – Single Slot, Type II, DAT Emulation

In addition, following this project, we are are pleased to add a Dual LUN emulator to our product portfolio.