Apacer Introduces Lineup of PATA SSDs
For those still using an IDE / PATA interface, Apacer's new range of SSDs may offer a viable upgrade.
Though most modern consumer computers have moved onto the SATA interface, many industrial and enterprise computers still use the relatively inefficient and slower IDE / PATA interface. Apacer has clearly targeted this market with its new lineup of "value added" PATA Solid State Drives which aim to offer a viable upgrade option to consumers. These drives offer a maximum capacity of 256 GB and feature a variety of security and transmission enhancements such as PIO Mode-4, MWDMA Mode-2, Ultra DMA-6, 72-bit ECC function, wear-leveling technology, and the S.M.A.R.T. self-monitoring analysis reporting technology.

The SSDs also come with Apacer's three tier data protection options, namely "Full Erase", "Destroy" and "Write Protection". The former ensures effective and complete erasure of data stored in the User Block and Free Block to prevent data theft, Destroy is an "advanced cleaning technology" that clears data from the storage and system blocks and meets the requirements of "national defense-class surveillance facilities. Finally, Write Protection offers data protection and is based on the concept of virtualization of the write-in process, which allows the user to choose from executing the write-in command or store the data in a temporary space. Under the temporary mode, the data is not written into the flash; instead it is stored independently from the operating system. Therefore, when abnormal activities are discovered in the system, one simple reboot will make the temporary virtual data disappear completely and effectively.
Apacer's lineup of SSDs are available in two configurations, the 2.5" 44 pin AFD 257 and the 1.8" 40 pin AFD 187 and offers a storage capacity of up to 256 GB.
ATA/ATAPI - version numbers of ATA/ATAPI standards supported by your HDD. Most modern HDD supports 4 version of standard.
Maximum PIO supported mode - PIO is the faster mode of transfer operation when default, but it uses the CPU for transferring data. Maximum mode always supports lower modes - for example, if your HDD supports PIO mode 4 - it also supports PIO 3, PIO 2-1
Maximum Multi Word DMA (MWDMA) mode - multi word DMA mode is the mode of transfer operations that use DMA - so it doesn't use the CPU while transferring data - so you can do make anything else while your HDD is working. MWDMA mode-2 = 16.6MB/s
Ultra DMA mode - new mode supported mostly in Pentium and other high-end systems. In this mode it also keeps the CPU free while the system transfers data, but it can work faster than MWDMA mode.
The benefit you'd get from SSD on PATA is primarily in the enormous Random IOPS, and not usually in max seq R/W speed. You'd still see incredibly reduced boot times, and significantly lower power usage.
As to the cost, if it were any more than a small PATA/SATA conversion board & a SATA SSD, I'd have to take a hard look at benchmarks to justify the added amount.
I know many plants that have very expensive process controllers where the manages are stressing every day about the possability of drive failure taking the plant out of service - this would fix that.
personally i would take 20mbps read write and no seek time, than maxing an ide and haveing 16+ms seek times.
its not about transfer speed, if you ever used a hdd as a boot, and than moved to a ssd boot, you will see the difference it makes in seconds, everything is responsive almost 100% of the time, where as a harddrive can take a few seconds to minutes to fully open folders.
lets think of this in terms of a system critical machine and a program that is no longer delveloped.
lets say that seek time is a factor to system responsive ness,
you get more productivity out of it because of the seek time, without needing to replace full infrostructures because of it.
now im sure there are things in a factory that can benefit from this, that would cost multiple millions to replace
remember computers are in everything.
well, lets see here... its a bare minimum of 250$ for the ssd, than they are aiming at enterprise, so lets times that by 4, and now useing an un used interface... ok... lets just say that the price will be very VERY high, but also may be wroth it for the enterprise market.
There still should be huge benefit for 512k/4k transfers. You are talking about sequential speed. Wouldn't this also have benefits on noise, battery life, and shake/drop resistance?
if one could be had for
think larger, i could see something that cost multiple millions and functionally has no reason to be replaced, needs a new drive...
so something built before sata that hangs because a hdd was the best they could do at the time
I do have an SSD OCZ Vertex 3 to be exact so I am well aware of the upsides to them. My original comment still stands.
Not really. Any system that could use drives such as these isn't one that needs huge total performance. These could be very useful for greatly reducing potential down times on older systems.
There are computerized machine shop equipment that NEED storage space... that are not easy to simply replace the whole motherboard, just because of HDD failure. On many of these, a 20GB HD would be more than enough storage space.