RoHS Compliant
Serial ATA Flash Drive
SAFD18S4 -M Product Specifications
March 23rd, 2012
Version 1.3
Apacer Technology Inc.
9/F, No. 100, Hsin Tai Wu Rd., Hsichih, Taipei Hsien 221, Taiwan
Tel: +886-2-2696-1666 Fax: +886-2-2696-1668
www.apacer.com
Apacer Technology Inc.
4th Fl., 75 Hsin Tai Wu Rd., Sec.1, Hsichih, New Taipei City, Taiwan 221
Tel: +886-2-2698-2888 Fax: +886-2-2698-2889
www.apacer.com
Serial ATA Flash Drive
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©2012 Apacer Technology Inc. Rev. 1.3
Features:
Standard Serial ATA 2.6 (Gen. 2)
– Serial ATA 2.6 (Gen. 2)
– SATAⅡ, 3.0 Gbps
– ATA-compatible command set
Capacities
– 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 GB
Performance*
– Burst read/write: 300 MB/sec
– Sustained read: up to 155 MB/sec
– Sustained write: up to 80 MB/sec
Intelligent endurance design
– Built-in hardware ECC, enabling up to
16/24 bit correction per 1K bytes
– Static 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.
– Power Failure Management
– ATA Secure Erase
– TRIM
NAND Flash Type: MLC
Data integrity under power-cycling
– No battery required for data storage
Temperature ranges
– Operation:
Standard: 0°C to 70°C (32 ~ 158°F)
Extended: -40 ~ +85°C (-40° ~ 185°F)**
– Storage: -40°C to 100°C (-40° ~ 212°F)
Supply voltage
– 5.0 V ± 5%
Power consumption (typical)*
– Active mode: 310 mA
– Idle mode: 86 mA
Form factor
– JEDEC MO-297
– Only 4mm in thickness
– Dimensions (54 x 39.8 x 4, unit: mm)
Connector
– 7-pin SATA signal connector
– 15-pin SATA power connector
Shock & Vibration
– Shock: 50g (approx.)
– Vibration: 15g (approx.)
RoHS compliant
*Varies from capacities. The values addressed here are typical and may vary depending on settings and platforms.
**Only available in 16, 32, 64GB capacities. Please see “Product Ordering Information” for details.
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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. Software Interface................................................................................................... 7
2.1 Command Set..........................................................................................................................7
2.2 S.M.A.R.T. ................................................................................................................................ 8
3. Flash Management ................................................................................................. 9
3.1 Error Correction/Detection ..................................................................................................... 9
3.2 Bad Block Management.......................................................................................................... 9
3.3 Wear Leveling.......................................................................................................................... 9
3.4 Power Failure Management .................................................................................................... 9
3.5 ATA Secure Erase ................................................................................................................... 9
3.6 TRIM....................................................................................................................................... 10
4. Environment Specifications................................................................................. 11
4.1 Environments.......................................................................................................................... 11
4.2 Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)................................................................................... 11
4.3 Certification and Compliance ............................................................................................... 11
5. Electrical Characteristics..................................................................................... 12
5.1 Operating Voltage ................................................................................................................. 12
5.2 Power Consumption............................................................................................................. 12
5.3 Electrostatic Discharge......................................................................................................... 12
5.4 Electrical Fast Transient/Burst ............................................................................................. 13
6. Physical Characteristics ...................................................................................... 14
7. Product Ordering Information ............................................................................. 16
7.1 Product Code Designations.................................................................................................. 16
7.2 Valid Combinations............................................................................................................... 17
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1. Product Description
1.1 Introduction
Apacer’s SAFD18S4-M 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.
SAFD18S4-M drive is designed with a single-chip controller, offering capacities of up to 128 gigabytes and
providing full support for the SATAⅡ high-speed interface standard. It can operate at sustained access rates
of up to 100 megabytes per second, which is much faster than any other solid-state or traditional SATA drive
currently available on the market. Though built with MLC, this SSD can work in highly demanding
environment as it can withstand ambient temperature from -40°C to +85°C (for certain capacities only).
In addition to buffer management through dynamical allocation, SAFD18S4-M adopts the Apacer-specific
global 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. SAFD18S4-M 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
SAFD18S4-M drive includes a single-chip SATAⅡ 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 SAFD18S4-M block diagram
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1.3 ATA Mode Support
SAFD18S4-M provides ATA mode support as follows:
Up to PIO mode-4
Up to Multiword DMA mode-2
Up to UDMA mode-5
1.4 Capacity Specification
Capacity specification of SAFD18S4-M 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*
8 GB 8,012,390,400 15,525 16 63 15,649,200
16 GB 16,013,942,784 16,383 16 63 31,277,232
32 GB 32,017,047,552 16,383 16 63 62,533,296
64 GB 64,023,257,088 16,383 16 63 125,045,424
128 GB 126,718,694,912 16,383 16 63 247,497,451
*Display of total bytes varies from file systems.
**Cylinders, heads or sectors are not applicable for these capacities. Only LBA addressing applies.
1.5 Performance
Performance of SAFD18S4-M is shown in Table 1-2.
Table 1-2 Performance specification
Capacity
Performance 8 GB 16 GB 32 GB 64 GB 128 GB
Sustained Read
(MB/s) 110 125 135 155 145
Sustained Write
(MB/s) 26 26 38 80 80
Note: Performance varies from flash configurations.
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1.6 Pin Assignments
Table 1-3 describes the SAFD signal segment, and Table1-4, power segment.
Figure 1-2 SATA Connectors
Table 1-3: Signal segment
Table 1-4: Power segment
Name
Type
Description
Pin Signal/Description
S1 GND
P1 Unused (3.3V)
S2 RxP
+ Differential Receive Signal
P2 Unused (3.3V)
S3 RxN
- Differential Receive Signal
P3 Unused (3.3V)
S4 GND
P4 Ground
S5 TxN
- Differential Transmit Signal
P5 Ground
S6 TxP
+ Differential Transmit Signal
P6 Ground
S7 GND
P7 5V
P8 5V
P9 5V
P10 Ground
P11 Reserved/Ground
P12 Ground
P13 Unused (12V)
P14 Unused (12V)
P15 Unused (12V)
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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. 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.
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2. Software Interface
2.1 Command Set
Table 2-1 summarizes the ATA commands supported by SAFD18S4-M.
Table 2-1: Command set
Code
Command
Code
Command
E5
h
Check Power Mode
F3
h
Security Erase Prepare
06h
Data Set Management
F4
h
Security Erase Unit
90
h
Execute Device Diagnostic
F5
h
Security Freeze Lock
E7
h
Flush Cache
F1
h
Security Set Passwo
rd
EA
h
Flush Cache EXT
F2
h
Security Unlock
Ec
h
Identify Device
70h
Seek
E3
h
Idle
Ef
h
Set Features
E1
h
Idle Immediate
C6
h
Set Multiple Mode
91h
Initialize Device Parameters
E6
h
Sleep
C8
h
Read DMA
B0
h
SMART
25
h
Read DMA EXT
E2
h
Stan
d
by
C4
h
Read Multi
ple
E0
h
Standby Immediate
29
h
Read Multiple EXT
Ca
h
Write DMA
20
h
Read Sector
35
h
Write DMA EXT
24
h
Read Sector EXT
C5
h
Write Multiple
40
h
Read Verify Sectors
39
h
Write Multiple EX
T
42
h
Read Verify Sectors EXT
30
h
Write Sector
10h
Recalibrate
34
h
Wri
te Sector EXT
F6
h
Security Disable Password
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2.2 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 devices use the standard SMART command B0h to read data out from the drive to activate our SMART
feature that complies with the ATA/ATAPI-7 specifications. Based on the SFF-8035i Rev. 2.0 specifications,
Apacer SMART defines vendor-specified SMART Attribute IDs (A0 ~ A5, and 0C). They represent Initial bad
block count, Bad block count, Spare block count, Maximum erase count, Average erase count and Power cycle.
When the Apacer SMART Utility running on the host, it analyzes and reports the disk status to the host before
the device reaches in critical condition.
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3. Flash Management
3.1 Error Correction/Detection
SAFD18S4-M implements a hardware ECC scheme, based on the BCH algorithm. It can detect and correct up
to 16 bits or 24 bits error in 1K bytes.
3.2 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. SAFD18S4-M’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.
3.3 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 static wear
leveling. They both ensure that the lifetime of the flash media can be increased, and the disk access
performance is optimized as well.
3.4 Power Failure Management
Power Failure Recovery ensures data transmission when experiencing unstable power supply. When power
disruption takes places, NAND Flash will have to cache multiple write-to-flash cycles to securely store data.
This urgent operation requires about several milliseconds to get it done. When the supplied voltage is below a
certain percentage of the required, the flash controller will be signaled by a detector IC component with low
power detection signal and then the firmware will communicate the controller to flush all the data into the cache
of Flash storage area. This can prevent incomplete data transmission.
The crucial part lies in the strength of the capacitor of the SSD. The capacitor must be able to hold up some
milliseconds of remaining time before the power is totally out, for the urgent write-back-into-flash operations to
complete.
3.5 ATA Secure Erase
Accomplished by the Secure Erase (SE) command, which added to the open ANSI standards that control disk
drives, “ATA Secure Erase” is built into the disk drive itself and thus far less susceptible to malicious software
attacks than external software utilities. It is a positive easy-to-use data destroy command, amounting to
electronic data shredding. Executing the command causes a drive to internally completely erase all possible
user data. This command is carried out within disk drives, so no additional software is required. Once executed,
neither data nor the erase counter on the device would be recoverable, which blurs the accuracy of device
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lifespan. The process to erase will not be stopped until finished while encountering power failure, and will be
continued when power is back on.
3.6 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.
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4. Environment Specifications
4.1 Environments
SAFD18S4-M environmental specifications follow the US Military Standard MIL-STD-810F, as shown in below
table.
Table 4-1 SAFD18S4-M environmental specifications
Environment Specification
0°C to 70°C (Operating-standard), -40 ~ +85°C (operating-extended)
Temperature -40°C to 100°C (Non-operating)
Humidity 5% to 95% RH (Non-condensing)
Vibration Sine wave : 15(G), 10~2000(Hz),
Random : 7.7(Grms), 20~2000(Hz)
Shock – Operating Acceleration: 1,500 G, 0.5 ms
Peak acceleration: 50 G, 11 ms
Note: extended operating temperature specifications are only available in 16, 32, 64GB capacities.
4.2 Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)
Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) is predicted based on reliability data for the individual components in
SAFD drive. Although many component of MTBF are given in databases and often these values are not really
accurate, the prediction result for the SAFD18S4-M is more than 1,000,000 hours.
Notes about the MTBF:
The MTBF is predicated and calculated based on “Telcordia Technologies Special Report, SR-332, Issue 2”
method.
4.3 Certification and Compliance
SAFD18S4-M complies with the following standards:
CE – EN55022/55024
FCC 47CFR Part15 Class B
RoHS
MIL-STD-810F
SATA II (SATA Rev. 2.6)
Up to ATA/ATAPI-7 ( including S.M.A.R.T.)
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5. Electrical Characteristics
5.1 Operating Voltage
Table 5-1 lists the supply voltage for SAFD18S4-M.
Table 5-1 SAFD18S4-M operating voltage
Parameter Conditions
Supply voltage 5V ±5% ( 4.75-5.25 V)
5.2 Power Consumption
Table 5-2 Power consumption (typical)
Capacity
Mode 8 GB 16 GB 32 GB 64 GB 128 GB
Active
(mA) 200 190 210 280 310
Stand By
(mA) 70 76 83 70 86
Note: Power consumptions may vary depending on settings and platforms
5.3 Electrostatic Discharge
Electrostatic discharge
Item Amount of
Discharge
Voltage Required
Criteria
Complied To Criteria
(A,B,C)
Air Discharge 10
10
+8kV
-8kV
B
B
A
A
Contact
Discharge
25
25
+4kV
-4kV
B
B
A
A
Indirect
Discharge
(HCP)
25
25
+4kV
-4kV
B
B
A
A
Indirect
Discharge
(VCP Front)
25
25
+4kV
-4kV
B
B
A
A
Indirect
Discharge
(VCP Left)
25
25
+4kV
-4kV
B
B
A
A
Indirect
Discharge
(VCP Back)
25
25
+4kV
-4kV
B
B
A
A
Indirect
Discharge 25 +4kV B A
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(VCP Right) 25 -4kV B A
5.4 Electrical Fast Transient/Burst
Electrical Fast Transient/Burst
Inject
Line Polarity Voltage
kV
Inject
Time
(Second)
Inject
Method
Required
Criteria
Complied
to
Criteria
L-N-PE ± 1kV 60 Direct B A
Notes about 5.3 Electrostatic Discharge & 5.4 Electrical Fast Transient/Burst
The tests performed are from lowest level up to the highest level as required by standard, but only highest level
is shown on the report.
Meet criteria A: Operate as intended during and after the test
Meet criteria B: Operate as intended after the test
Meet criteria C: Loss/Error of function
Additional Information:
EUT stopped operation and could / could not be reset by operator at kV.
No false alarms or other malfunctions were observed during or after the test.
The Contact discharges were applied at least total 200 discharges at a minimum of four test points.
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6. Physical Characteristics
Unit: ㎜
Tolerance: ± 0.2
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Unit: ㎜
Tolerance: ± 0.2
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7. Product Ordering Information
7.1 Product Code Designations
A P S 184 5 x x x x – A CM X
Serial ATA Flash Drive
Apacer Product Code
MO-297 Form Factor
Solution version
C
apacit
ies
:
008G = 8GB
016G = 16GB
032G = 32GB
064G = 64GB
128G =128GB
Flash type
Version Control
Temperature
Range
Blank: Standard
W: Extended Temperature
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7.2 Valid Combinations
Capacity
Standard Extended Temperature
8GB
APS1845008G-ACM --
16GB
APS1845016G-ACM APS1845016G-ACMW
32GB
APS1845032G-ACM APS1845032G-ACMW
64GB
APS1845064G-ACM APS1845064G-ACMW
128GB
APS1845128G-ACM --
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.
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©2012 Apacer Technology Inc. Rev. 1.3
Revision History
Revision Description Date
0.1 Preliminary release 11/17/2011
1.0 Official release 11/21/2011
1.1 Updated operating temperatures
Updated address of our European branch
11/29/2011
1.2 Revised capacity information 1/20/2012
1.3 Revised S.M.A.R.T information 03/23/2012
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Global Presence
Taiwan (Headquarters)
Apacer Technology Inc.
4th Fl., 75 Hsin Tai Wu Rd., Sec.1
Hsichih, New Taipei City
Taiwan 221
R.O.C.
Tel: +886-2-2698-2888
Fax: +886-2-2698-2889
amtsales@apacer.com
U.S.A.
Apacer Memory America, Inc.
386 Fairview Way, Suite102,
Milpitas, CA 95035
Tel: 1-408-518-8699
Fax: 1-408-935-9611
sa@apacerus.com
Japan
Apacer Technology Corp.
5F, Matsura Bldg., Shiba, Minato-Ku
Tokyo, 105-0014, Japan
Tel: 81-3-5419-2668
Fax: 81-3-5419-0018
jpservices@apacer.com
Europe
Apacer Technology B.V.
Science Park Eindhoven 5051 5692 EB Son,
The Netherlands
Tel: 31-40-267-0000
Fax: 31-40-267-0000#6199
sales@apacer.nl
China
Apacer Electronic (Shanghai) Co., Ltd
1301, No.251,Xiaomuqiao Road, Shanghai,
200032, China
Tel: 86-21-5529-0222
Fax: 86-21-5206-6939
sales@apacer.com.cn
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
sales_india@apacer.com
