RoHS Compliant Serial ATA Flash Drive Specifications for AS203 July 14th, 2011 Apacer Technology Inc. 4th Fl., 75 Hsin Tai Wu Rd., Sec.1, Hsichih, New Taipei City, Taiwan 221 Tel: +886-2-2698-2888 www.apacer.com Fax: +886-2-2698-2889 Serial ATA Flash Drive APXXXXGAS203-X Features: z Standard Serial ATA 2.6 (Gen. 2) – Serial ATA 2.6 (Gen. 2) – SATA II, 3.0 Gbps – ATA-compatible command set z Capacities – 32, 64, 128, 256 GB z Performance* – Sustained read: up to 250 MB/sec – Sustained write: up to 220 MB/sec z Intelligent endurance design – Built-in ECC, enabling 48 bit correction per 2KB page – Superior wear-leveling scheme together with dynamical block allocation to significantly increase the lifetime of a flash device and optimize the disk performance – Flash bad-block management – S.M.A.R.T – TRIM z Zero power data retention – No battery required for data storage z Temperature ranges – Operation: 0°C to 70°C – Storage: -40°C to 85°C z Supply voltage – 5.0 V ± 5% z Power consumption** – Active mode: 1030 mA (Max) – Idle mode: 40 mA z Form factor – 2.5 inch z Connector – 7-pin SATA male connector – 15-pin SATA power connector z RoHS compliant *Vary with flash configurations. **Based on 128 GB model 1 © 2011 Apacer Technology Inc. Rev. 1.0 Serial ATA Flash Drive APXXXXGAS203-X Table of Contents 1. Product Description ................................................................................................. 3 1.1 Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 3 1.2 Functional Block Diagram........................................................................................................... 3 1.3 ATA Mode Support....................................................................................................................... 4 1.4 Capacity Specification................................................................................................................. 4 1.5 Performance ................................................................................................................................. 4 1.6 Pin Assignments .......................................................................................................................... 5 2. Flash Management ................................................................................................... 7 2.1 Error Correction/Detection.......................................................................................................... 7 2.2 Bad Block Management............................................................................................................... 7 2.3 Wear Leveling ............................................................................................................................... 7 2.4 S.M.A.R.T....................................................................................................................................... 7 2.5 TRIM............................................................................................................................................... 8 3. Environmental Specifications ................................................................................. 9 3.1 Environments ............................................................................................................................... 9 3.2 Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) ........................................................................................ 9 3.3 Certification and Compliance ..................................................................................................... 9 4. Physical Characteristics........................................................................................ 10 5. Product Ordering Information ............................................................................... 11 2 © 2011 Apacer Technology Inc. Rev. 1.0 Serial ATA Flash Drive APXXXXGAS203-X 1. Product Description 1.1 Introduction Apacer’s Serial ATA Flash Drive AS203 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, AS203 drive interfaces with the host allowing data to be seamlessly transferred between the host and the flash devices. AS203 is designed with a single-chip controller, offering capacities of up to 256 gigabytes and providing full support for the SATA II high-speed interface standard. It can operate at sustained access rates of up to 250 megabytes per second. In addition to buffer management through dynamical allocation, AS203 adopts the Apacer-specific superior 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. 1.2 Functional Block Diagram AS203 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 AS203 block diagram 3 © 2011 Apacer Technology Inc. Rev. 1.0 Serial ATA Flash Drive APXXXXGAS203-X 1.3 ATA Mode Support AS203 provides ATA mode support as follows: z z z 1.4 Up to PIO mode-4 Up to Multiword DMA mode-2 Up to UDMA mode-6 Capacity Specification Capacity specification of the Apacer SSD product family is available as shown in Table 1-1. It lists the specific capacity, the default numbers of logical cylinders and heads, and the number of logical sectors per track for each product line. Table 1-1 Capacity specification Capacity Total Bytes Cylinders Heads Sectors Max LBA* 32 GB 32,017,047,552 16383 16 63 62,533,296 64 GB 64,023,257,088 16383 16 63 125,045,424 128 GB 128,035,676,160 16383 16 63 250,069,680 256 GB 256,060,514,304 16383 16 63 500,118,192 *Cylinders, heads or sectors are not applicable for these capacities. Only LBA addressing applies. 1.5 Performance Performance of AS203 in each capacity is shown in Table 1-2. Table 1-2 Performance specification Capacity Performance Sustained Read (MB/s) Sustained Write (MB/s) 32 GB 64 GB 128 GB 256 GB 200 230 250 250 100 180 220 220 Note: Performances vary from flash configurations; 4 © 2011 Apacer Technology Inc. Rev. 1.0 Serial ATA Flash Drive APXXXXGAS203-X 1.6 Pin Assignments Table 1-3 describes AS203 signal segment, and Table1-4, its power segment. Figure 1-2 SATA Connectors Table 1-3: Signal segment Name Type S1 GND S2 RxP S3 RxN S4 GND S5 TxN S6 TxP S7 GND Table 1-4: Power segment Description Serial Data Receiver Serial Data Transmitter Pin Signal/Description P1 Not used (3.3V) P2 Not used (3.3V) P3 Not used (3.3V) P4 Ground P5 Ground P6 Ground P7 5V Pre-Charge P8 5V P9 5V P10 Ground P11 Reserved P12 Ground P13 Not used (12V Pre-Charge) P14 Not used (12V) P15 Not used (12V) 5 © 2011 Apacer Technology Inc. Rev. 1.0 Serial ATA Flash Drive APXXXXGAS203-X Figure 1-3 SATA Cable / Connector Connection Diagram The connector on the left represents the Host with TX/RX differential pairs connected to a cable while the connector on the right shows the Device with TX/RX differential pairs also connected to the cable. Notice also the ground path connecting the shielding of the cable to the Cable Receptacle. 6 © 2011 Apacer Technology Inc. Rev. 1.0 Serial ATA Flash Drive APXXXXGAS203-X 2. Flash Management 2.1 Error Correction/Detection AS203 implements a hardware ECC scheme, based on the algorithm, to achieve 48 bit correction per 2KB page. 2.2 Bad Block Management Although bad blocks on the flash media are already identified by the flash manufacturer, they can also be accumulated over time during operation AS203’s controller maintains a table that lists those normal blocks with disk data, the free blocks for wear leveling, and bad blocks with errors. When a normal block is detected broken, it is replaced with a free block and listed as a bad block. When a free block is detected broken, it is then removed from the free block list and marked as a bad block. During device operation, this ensures that newly accumulated bad blocks are transparent to the host. The device will stop file write service once there are only two free blocks left such that the read function is still available for copying the files from the disk into another. 2.3 Wear Leveling The NAND flash devices are limited by a certain number of write cycles. When using a FAT-based file system, frequent FAT table updates are required. If some area on the flash wears out faster than others, it would significantly reduce the lifetime of the whole SSD, even if the erase counts of others are far from the write cycle limit. Thus, if the write cycles can be distributed evenly across the media, the lifetime of the media can be prolonged significantly. This scheme is called wear leveling. Apacer’s wear-leveling scheme is achieved both via buffer management and Apacer-specific superior wear leveling to ensure the lifetime of the flash media can be increased and the disk access performance is optimized as well. 2.4 S.M.A.R.T. S.M.A.R.T. is an acronym for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology, an open standard allowing disk drives to automatically monitor their own health and report potential problems. It protects the user from unscheduled downtime by monitoring and storing critical drive performance and calibration parameters. Ideally, this should allow taking proactive actions to prevent impending drive failure. Apacer AS203 uses the standard SMART command B0h to read data from the drive for SMART feature as the SATA Rev.2.6 ATA/ATAPI-7 specifications are based on the SFF-8035i Rev. 2.0 specifications. 7 © 2011 Apacer Technology Inc. Rev. 1.0 Serial ATA Flash Drive APXXXXGAS203-X 2.5 TRIM Made of millions of NAND flash cells, SSD can be written into groups called pages in 4K size generally, but can only be erased in larger groups called blocks of 128 pages or 512KB. These stipulations are partially the source of many performance issues. Until an address gets used again, the SSD has to keep track of every last bit of data that’s written on it. The ATA-TRIM instruction tilts the balance in favor of the SSD. TRIM addresses a major part of the performance degradation issue over time that plagues all SSDs. A TRIM enabled drive running an OS with TRIM support will stay closer to its peak performance over time. 8 © 2011 Apacer Technology Inc. Rev. 1.0 Serial ATA Flash Drive APXXXXGAS203-X 3. Environmental Specifications 3.1 Environments Table 3-1 AS203 environmental specifications Environment Temperature Specification 0°C to 70°C (Operating) -40°C to 85°C (Storage) Humidity 95% under 55°C Vibration 20G/80-2000Hz Shock 3.2 1500G/0.5ms Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) is predicted based on reliability data for the individual components in the SAFD drive. Although many component MTBFs are given in databases and often these values are not really accurate, the prediction result for AS203 is more than 1,000,000 hours. 3.3 Certification and Compliance AS203 drive complies with the following standards: z z z z CE FCC RoHS SATA II (SATA Rev. 2.6) 9 © 2011 Apacer Technology Inc. Rev. 1.0 Serial ATA Flash Drive APXXXXGAS203-X 4. Physical Characteristics Figure 4-1 illustrates the overall dimensions of AS203 drive, as listed in Table 4-1. Table 4-1 SAFD dimensions Millimeters (㎜) Dimension Height 9.50 ± 0.20 Width 69.90 ± 0.15 Length 100.00 ± 0.20 Unit: ㎜ Figure 4-1 AS203 physical dimensions 10 © 2011 Apacer Technology Inc. Rev. 1.0 Serial ATA Flash Drive APXXXXGAS203-X 5. Product Ordering Information AP32GAS203 32 GB AP32GAS203-1 AP32GAS203-5 AP64GAS203 64 GB AP64GAS203-1 AP64GAS203-5 AP128GAS203 128 GB AP128GAS203-1 AP128GAS203-5 AP256GAS203 256 GB AP256GAS203-1 AP256GAS203-5 Note: Valid combinations are those products in mass production or will be in mass production. Consult your Apacer sales representative to confirm availability of valid combinations and to determine availability of new combinations. 11 © 2011 Apacer Technology Inc. Rev. 1.0 Serial ATA Flash Drive APXXXXGAS203-X Global Presence Taiwan (Headquarters) Apacer Technology Inc. 4th Fl., 75 Hsin Tai Wu Rd., Sec.1, Hsichih, New Taipei City, 221 Taiwan, R.O.C. Tel: +886-2-2698-2888 Fax: +886-2-2698-2889 [email protected] U.S.A. Apacer Memory America, Inc. 386 Fairview Way, Suite102, Milpitas, CA 95035 Tel: 1-408-518-8699 Fax: 1-408-935-9611 [email protected] Japan Apacer Technology Corp. 5F, Matsura Bldg., Shiba, Minato-Ku Tokyo, 105-0014, Japan Tel: 81-3-5419-2668 Fax: 81-3-5419-0018 [email protected] Europe Apacer Technology B.V. Aziëlaan 22, 5232 BA 's-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands Tel: 31-73-645-9620 Fax: 31-73-645-9629 [email protected] China Apacer Electronic (Shanghai) Co., Ltd 1301, No.251,Xiaomuqiao Road, Shanghai, 200032, China Tel: 86-21-5529-0222 Fax: 86-21-5206-6939 [email protected] India Apacer Technologies Pvt Ltd, #1064, 1st Floor, 7th ‘A’ Main, 3rd Block Koramangala, Bangalore – 560 034 Tel: +91 80 4152 9061/62/63 Fax: +91 80 4170 0215 [email protected] 12 © 2011 Apacer Technology Inc. Rev. 1.0 Mouser Electronics Authorized Distributor Click to View Pricing, Inventory, Delivery & Lifecycle Information: Apacer: AP128GAS203 AP256GAS203 AP32GAS203 AP64GAS203