KingSpec Introduces the Yansen 2.5-inch Enterprise SSDs

[btarunr]

At Embedded World 2024 in Nuremberg, Germany, industrial grade storage brand KingSpec (also known as YANSEN) presented its 2.5" SSD specialized for in-vehicle storage solutions. Embedded World serves as a global platform gathering industry-leading enterprises, technologies, and experts. At this exhibition, YANSEN showcased a solution specifically designed for in vehicle, rail transit and surveillance industries. With the rapid growth of electric vehicles and intelligent connected cars, the demand for reliable, high-capacity in-vehicle data storage is soaring. Secure storage solutions are becoming more essential. YANSEN's 2.5" in-vehicle SSD is engineered specifically for challenging transportation applications.

Rail transit operations face challenging conditions, requiring storage hardware capable of enduring wide temperature ranges, vibrations, and humidity. The 2.5" in-vehicle SSD has undergone rigorous testing beyond industry standards, with an operating temperature range of 0°C to 70°C and an MTBF exceeding 2 million hours. The product features conformal coating and underfill dispensing design to ensure data integrity even in extreme environments.



Robust Protection Against Data Loss
During vehicle operation, issues like voltage fluctuations and unexpected power losses can occur, posing risks of data loss for traditional storage devices. YANSEN's 2.5" in-vehicle SSD supports firmware-level power loss protection (PLP), backing up and restoring the latest data to prevent firmware and data corruption effectively.

Moreover, the 2.5" in-vehicle SSD employs a TLC direct writing algorithm, optimizing Flash management strategies to maintain consistent write speed and resolve potential frame drops during extended high-density data storage, ensuring complete video data integrity.

Comprehensive Storage Solutions
As automotive intelligence advances, in-vehicle storage requirements for capacity and reliability continue to increase. YANSEN has a comprehensive lineup, offering different product portfolios to meet diverse storage needs across different scenarios. Its product portfolio is already widely adopted in applications like passenger transport, logistics freight, law enforcement vehicles, high-speed rail, and other mobile transportation vehicles.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[ncrs]

ANSEN's 2.5" in-vehicle SSD supports firmware-level power loss protection (PLP), backing up and restoring the latest data to prevent firmware and data corruption effectively.

What does that even mean? Does it have PLP capacitors or not?

 

[GabrielLP14]

What does that even mean? Does it have PLP capacitors or not?

No it doesn't. Its a marketing manouver

 

[Roph]

Enterprise, TLC? hah

 

[LabRat 891]

Enterprise, TLC? hah

Worse. These are for 'automotive' use. Most TLC NAND has 3-5year (tops) guaranteed (unpowered) data retention.

Let your car sit in storage, while you live / work overseas? Too bad, ECU/PCM and/or infotainment system is now dead.
Thankfully, I wouldn't expect any company but a 'kit shop' use a KingSpec-brand SSD for an infotainment system, etc.
Maybe, some of those ultra-budget Chinese BEVs/small ICE cars but, that's not a worry in the states

Of note:
Tesla already had a run-in with this issue. (IIRC) the eMMC they chose, merely wore out.
Bricked car, from no fault of the owner.

No thanks.

 

[micropage7]

Worse. These are for 'automotive' use. Most TLC NAND has 3-5year (tops) guaranteed (unpowered) data retention.

Let your car sit in storage, while you live / work overseas? Too bad, ECU/PCM and/or infotainment system is now dead.
Thankfully, I wouldn't expect any company but a 'kit shop' use a KingSpec-brand SSD for an infotainment system, etc.
Maybe, some of those ultra-budget Chinese BEVs/small ICE cars but, that's not a worry in the states

Of note:
Tesla already had a run-in with this issue. (IIRC) the eMMC they chose, merely wore out.
Bricked car, from no fault of the owner.

No thanks.

so far there's no solution for something like that, SSD offers you the speed but the reability still a big question especially for long term or in heavy traffic/ industrila environment

 

[LabRat 891]

so far there's no solution for something like that, SSD offers you the speed but the reability still a big question especially for long term or in heavy traffic/ industrila environment

"non-ROHS Phase Change Memory" Fixed.
I know, I know... A real "solution" must be affordable, available, and comply w/ regulations.

BAE implements a PCM technology, that they use in Aerospace; an 'earlier fork' of 3DXpoint/Optane-related IPs.

Ovonic Unified Memory | Seminar Report, PPT, PDF for ECE Students

Explore Ovonic Unified Memory with Free Download of Seminar Report and PPT in PDF and DOC Format. Also Explore the Seminar Topics Paper on Ovonic Unified Memory with Abstract or Synopsis, Documentation on Advantages and Disadvantages, Base Paper Presentation Slides for IEEE Final Year...

www.seminarsonly.com

Numonyx thanks Ovonyx for the memory

More than just a Phase Change

www.theregister.com

https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-details/numonyx-and-ovonyx-sign-technology-licensing-agreement-phase

There are other 'semi-exotic' memory technologies in aerospace-industrial-automotive use however, it's not high-density or its very expensive/exclusive.


I suppose my rub is seeing 'high volume consumer-quality' NAND devices being more and more pushed into applications they don't belong.

 

[Wirko]

so far there's no solution for something like that, SSD offers you the speed but the reability still a big question especially for long term or in heavy traffic/ industrila environment

The solution might be to use SLC and store thrice less data.

What does that even mean? Does it have PLP capacitors or not?

But is that important? If the ECU loses power while actively writing to the SSD, which means while driving, you'll likely have worse things to worry about than some data corruption.

 

[LabRat 891]

If the ECU loses power while actively writing to the SSD, which means while driving, you'll likely have worse things to worry about than some data corruption.

Point.

pSLC (TLC, etc. in single bit mode), is not quite as durable as real SLC (at least reading off datasheet specs).
Still, 'better'.

 

[GabrielLP14]

Point.

pSLC (TLC, etc. in single bit mode), is not quite as durable as real SLC (at least reading off datasheet specs).
Still, 'better'.

depends on nand flash die

 

[ncrs]

But is that important? If the ECU loses power while actively writing to the SSD, which means while driving, you'll likely have worse things to worry about than some data corruption.

I'm having issues with using the term "PLP" for something that clearly isn't a proper implementation with capacitors.
To be honest I'm not really interested in the automotive use case, but using drives like that for Ceph storage which works best with PLP drives. That leaves either expensive enterprise drives or something that's close enough with PLP. Since I'm mainly using commodity hardware I'm interested in SATA PLP drives specifically.

 

[Wirko]

I'm having issues with using the term "PLP" for something that clearly isn't a proper implementation with capacitors.
To be honest I'm not really interested in the automotive use case, but using drives like that for Ceph storage which works best with PLP drives. That leaves either expensive enterprise drives or something that's close enough with PLP. Since I'm mainly using commodity hardware I'm interested in SATA PLP drives specifically.

Do you actually need power loss protection, or are you taking advantage of the side effects of proper PLP with capacitors? PLP can be achieved in software/firmware but it needs additional metadata to be written. You prefer to avoid that because it impairs both performance and endurance. Do I understand that right?

 

[ncrs]

Do you actually need power loss protection, or are you taking advantage of the side effects of proper PLP with capacitors? PLP can be achieved in software/firmware but it needs additional metadata to be written. You prefer to avoid that because it impairs both performance and endurance. Do I understand that right?

Ceph is very particular about its writing mechanics, unlike most other filesystems it is waiting for confirmation from the storage drive that the write has been successful. A PLP SSD will reply immediately because the firmware can guarantee that the received data will be committed to NAND even in the event of power loss. In case of IO pressure it will throttle the replies due to internal buffer capacity, but that's normal scaling.
A consumer non-PLP drive will suffer huge performance degradation in this metric because they do not acknowledge writes immediately. For example a 512GB Samsung 970 "PRO" M.2 NVMe provides only 840 IOPS while a PLP-equipped 240GB Samsung PM863a SATA does 58876 IOPS so a 70x increase despite lower capacity and way slower interface.
Obviously firmware can emulate the behavior of PLP, and I think that's happening in this particular instance, but it won't provide the same level of safety and potentially performance as a drive with PLP capacitors.
While this is a pretty niche use case it still demonstrates some differences between consumer and enterprise SSDs.

 

[Wirko]

Ceph is very particular about its writing mechanics, unlike most other filesystems it is waiting for confirmation from the storage drive that the write has been successful. A PLP SSD will reply immediately because the firmware can guarantee that the received data will be committed to NAND even in the event of power loss. In case of IO pressure it will throttle the replies due to internal buffer capacity, but that's normal scaling.
A consumer non-PLP drive will suffer huge performance degradation in this metric because they do not acknowledge writes immediately. For example a 512GB Samsung 970 "PRO" M.2 NVMe provides only 840 IOPS while a PLP-equipped 240GB Samsung PM863a SATA does 58876 IOPS so a 70x increase despite lower capacity and way slower interface.
Obviously firmware can emulate the behavior of PLP, and I think that's happening in this particular instance, but it won't provide the same level of safety and potentially performance as a drive with PLP capacitors.
While this is a pretty niche use case it still demonstrates some differences between consumer and enterprise SSDs.

Thanks for the explanation. So PLP is most needed in environments such as datacenters, where power loss is basically impossible. That seems ironic. But if the impossible happens, and not all SSDs in a distributed storage system lose power at exactly the same time, there's a high chance of bad data corruption - unless writing is managed by a robust transaction-based system as you described it.