Extra Information
Here you'll find some extra background information on the drives themselves.
"A USB flash drive is essentially NAND-type flash memory integrated with a USB 1.1 or 2.0 interface. It is a small, lightweight, removable and rewritable data storage device of up to 64 GB, with the price per MB decreasing rapidly at newer, larger capacities."
This is how a general USB drive is described on wikipedia and taking that we have tried to find out what makes these drives 'tic'. These drives have a USB 2.0 interface and for all the drives that is determined as the UT161 controller by USBest. Check out what USBest has to say about this controller.
"UT161 is an Advanced Hi-speed USB Flash Disk Controller intended for supporting Flash memory device and pin-to-pin compatible with UT168/UT166. It provides enhanced performance at 24MB/s for Read access and 17MB/s for Write Access, and supports comprehensive Flash technologies, including Single Level Cell (SLC) and Multi-Level Cell (MLC) NAND Flash, NROM and AG-AND Flash memory. It allows the manufacturer to improve device performance and maximize flexibility in flash decision."
That's impressive to say the least; the throughput for instance is very high on this controller. If you look on the information page on their website, you will see that this controller handles most of the functions the drives have. Functions like the LED light, write protect and booting is handled by this device.
Another important part of the drives is of course the memory itself. In this case there's a difference in memory types used for the Twister drives and the Pro drive. The Twisters use an Assist Gate-AND flash memory developed by Hitachi and Renesas and the Pro uses a NAND Single Level Cell (SLC) Flash memory developed by Samsung. I've tried to find more information on these memory types and I've come up with the following exurbs.
"AG-AND (Assist Gate-AND) is a flash memory cell jointly developed by Hitachi and Renesas Technology. The cell structure employs original Hitachi and Renesas Technology field isolation technology comprising a combination of alternating assist gates that prevent inter-cell interference, enabling a smaller cell area and high-speed programming."
"Offered in 1G x 8bit, the K9K8G08U0A is a 8G-bit NAND Flash Memory with spare 256M-bit. Its NAND cell provides the most costeffective solution for the solid state application market. A program operation can be performed in typical 200µs on the (2K+64)Byte page and an erase operation can be performed in typical 1.5ms on a (128K+4K)Byte block. Data in the data register can be read out at 25ns cycle time per Byte. The I/O pins serve as the ports for address and data input/output as well as command input. The on-chip write controller automates all program and erase functions including pulse repetition, where required, and internal verification and margining of data. Even the write-intensive systems can take advantage of the K9K8G08U0's extended reliability of 100K program/ erase cycles by providing ECC(Error Correcting Code) with real time mapping-out algorithm. The K9K8G08U0A is an optimum solution for large nonvolatile storage applications such as solid state file storage and other portable applications requiring non-volatility.
An ultra high density solution having two 8Gb stacked with two chip selects is also available in standard TSOPI package."
There wasn't much information I could turn up on the first set of flash memory and the other is quite extensive. What does this all translate to? The memory types are adapted to the field of use, e.g. the Pro uses a more extensive and secure memory flash type then the twisters do, because it has a more business like application then the Twister drives. The controller is the same for all drives because it's flexible to serve both memory types with a single chip and can handle a very high throughput in both cases. That's very cost effective. It means that the memory is adjusted so that it reflects the application for which it is used.
If you would like to read about USB drives in general or about the components themselves you can use the links I have used to research this information. Check out the links below to find the information.
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