Aug 17, 2010 08:07 GMT  ·  By

Since solid state drives are known for being fast, reliable and power-efficient, Viking Modular Solutions decided to add super compactness to that list of advantages and, thus, came up with the Slim SATA SSDs, a number of very thin devices designed for various industrial applications.

There is no question that the consumer and enterprise fronts are quite abundant in SSDs, especially models based on the SandForce controller, so Viking went for another outlet.

Thus, it focused on compactness, and managed to build a number of SATA 3.0 Gbps SSDs that are less than half as large as regular 2.5-inch solutions.

This is an important asset, as it allows the products to be used in a large number of applications, such as gaming, telecommunications, embedded server and storage systems, field computing and defense and, finally, aerospace applications.

The solid state drives boast capacities of 25GB, 60GB and 120GB, which is not to be frowned upon, knowing the physical size of the flash-based units.

What's more, they all come with built-in AES-128 encryption and versions constructed out of SLC (single-level cell), MLC (multi-level cell) or eMLC (enterprise multi-level cell) NAND Flash memory chips.

What's more, they benefit from some performance-enhancing and optimization technologies, such as 'intelligent' write management techniques that significantly boost endurance.

All in all, the newcomers can achieve data transfer speeds of up to 260 MB/s. Unfortunately, pricing details are undisclosed.

"With this optimized small form factor SSD, communications and embedded applications can realize the performance associated with full size SSDs," said Adrian Proctor, vice president of marketing at Viking Modular.

"Now, system designers can take advantage of an ideal combination of performance, capacity, power, size and cost," Proctor added.

The Viking Slim SATA employs an exclusive controller that “features protection against normally catastrophic flash page and block failures” and can detect data path CRC errors, preserving the integrity of what is stored on it.