Serial ATA Flash Drive

AP-SAFD254QAxxxxS-XXHT

4

©2011 Apacer Technology Inc.

Rev. 1.5

1. Product Description

1.1

Introduction

Apacer’s Serial ATA Flash Drive (SAFD) is a solid-state disk (SSD) drive that contains a controller, embedded

firmware, and flash media along with a male connector. Using NAND flash memory devices, the SAFD drive

interfaces with the host allowing data to be seamlessly transferred between the host and the flash devices.

The SAFD 254 drive is designed with a single-chip controller, offering capacities of up to 128 gigabytes and

providing full support for the SATA II high-speed interface standard. It can operate at sustained access rates

of up to 168 megabytes per second, which is much faster than any other solid-state or traditional SATA drive

currently available on the market.

In addition to buffer management through dynamical allocation, the SAFD 254 adopts the Apacer-specific

static wear-leveling scheme to allow uniform use of all storage blocks, ensuring that the lifetime of a flash

media can be significantly increased and the disk performance is optimized as well. The SAFD 254 provides

the S.M.A.R.T. feature that follows the SATA Rev. 2.6, ATA/ATAPI-7 specifications and uses the standard

SMART command B0h to read data from the drive. This feature protects the user from unscheduled downtime

by monitoring and storing critical drive performance.

1.2

Functional Block Diagram

The SAFD 254 drive includes a single-chip SATA II Controller and the flash media, as well as the SATA

standard interface. The controller integrates the flash management unit with the controller itself to support

multi-channel, multi-bank flash arrays. Figure 1-1 shows the functional block diagram.

Figure 1-1 Apacer SAFD 254 block diagram