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Ask yourself this question: Would it be beneficial to know how long a drive will last in the field?
Traditional solid state drives and flash cards simply operate until they fail. SiSMART, with its ability to read and display the remaining amount of a drive’s useable life, eliminates this uncertainty. By preventing unanticipated drive failures, SiSMART can save companies hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in lost data, emergency maintenance and system downtime costs.
Schedule field maintenance on your time table. SiSMART, the industry's first self-monitoring early warning system, is integrated into every SiliconDrive. With SiSMART onboard OEMs can set usage model thresholds to schedule field maintenance and drive replacement without incurring expensive unscheduled downtime.
How SiSMART Works
Drive wear-out is a significant problem for users of any solid state storage system. Sudden, unforeseen failures cause expensive delays, disruptions, data loss and ultimately diminished revenue. Traditional solid state drives and flash cards simply operate until they fail, without warning.
SiSMART is an endurance-monitoring tool that acts like a fuel gauge for the host system, by monitoring the write/erase cycles of each block, as well as the use of spare blocks on the SiliconDrive. If a block wears out, it is replaced by a spare. When the drive uses up all of its spares, the drive stops working. SiSMART furnishes the host system with the number of spares still available on the drive. Using this information, the host can manage its resources more effectively.
Monitoring Write/Erase Cycles of Each Block
By tracking and tabulating the write/erase transactions for each block on the SiliconDrive, SiSMART can calculate the percentage of drive life remaining. Information is displayed in a linear view, which clearly details where the drive is in its lifecycle. This gives the host the ability to predict when a drive will fail. Using this information, the drive can replaced before it can cause any unscheduled downtime.
A SiliconDrive solid state drive collects the SiSMART information and stores it internally. SiSMART starts when the drive is first turned on so users can access SiSMART at any time.
SiSMART is available in a software development kit (SDK) from WD. The software library and the documentation in the SDK show the interface to the library. A programmer's guide is included, showing how to integrate SiSMART into an OEMs application. |