White Paper
The positioning of the PATA SSD market has changed a lot in the past 10 years.
For one thing, the terminology has changed. For example, back in July 2000- when SST launched a PATA SSD on a chip – they called it an “ADC” (ATA-Disk Chip). In those days people didn’t need to differentiate between PATA and SATA – because the 1st working prototype SATA hard drive wasn’t unveiled until August 2000 – and the 1st SATA SSD didn’t appear until 2005.
Today the main role of PATA SSDs is to replace hard drives in low power consumption notebooks and also embedded products and legacy servers which don’t need the higher performance ceiling offered by their serially attached (SATA) cousins – but which can benefit from the higher performance and reliability (or lower cost) that flash SSDs offer – compared to hard drives.
What about the future of the PATA SSD market?
You may have thought PATA would disappear – because of the higher performance offered by SATA SSDs. But you would be wrong.
On the contrary one advantage of the lower R/W performance of PATA (compared to SATA) is that designers can use cheaper (slower or older) SSD Controllers – because endurance concerns are reduced by a factor of 2x to 6x compared to the fastest SATA SSDs. As the controller can be a significant part of the overall SSD cost in lower capacity products – that translates to a big competitive advantage.
And as SATA SSDs get faster – and move on to 600MB/s speeds (SATA 3.0) – the difference in power consumption between PATA and SATA SSDs creates another reason to regard them as distinct viable market segments.
This is why new PATA SSDs are still being launched today.
Accelerated Memory Production manufactures PATA SSD’s in many form factors with long life cycles. Manufactured here in USA, we have the capability of locking the BOM for the length of the project.
PATA SSDs are not always as simple as you might think. If you’re looking for the ultimate in low power consumption – be sure to check that the device you’re looking at is a native PATA device. Some PATA devices on the market today are actually SATA SSDs with an add-in PATA adapter.
Accelerated Memory Production offers 2.5 PATA SSD, 1.8 PATA SSD embedded form factors.
