Foremay, a 9-year-old storage company based in Pasadena, Calif., with offices in Norway, Korea, China and Taiwan, made some news March 24 with the announcement of its first disk-on-chip solid-state hard drive.
The company’s OC177 SSD is a NAND flash drive that measures only 22x22x1.8 mm. The thin and light chip, dubbed DOC, supports standard IDE or SATA host interface, and complies with ATA-7 specifications. Current shipping capacity is up to 32GB with a read/write speed up to 70/40MB per second. 64GB capacity is expected in the third quarter.
The specs look impressive. But does it perform?
“Foremay’s DOC drive eliminates the need to have a disk drive attached to the computer motherboard,” said CTO Jack Winters. The DOC can be soldered directly onto the motherboard via its LGA or BGA pins, which also significantly enhances the anti-shock and anti-vibration performance from DOC-equipped computers.”
The DOC chip disk is designed for high reliability and rugged embedded-computing applications where ultra-compact, ultra-low profile, ultra-high anti-shock and/or ultra-high anti-vibration capability are required.
Applications for DOC include embedded computers and industrial PCs; military, defense and aerospace applications; rugged laptops and handheld computing machines; camcorders, and
other handheld devices.
IDE/PATA DOC is now shipping in volumes with capacities up to 32GB. 64GB IDE DOC and SATA DOC are expected to be available in the third quarter.
