5 Key Reasons Industrial-Grade Applications Deserve Industrial-Grade SSDs

Are you struggling to find the perfect SSD for your AIoT project? Is your progress being impacted by firmware and software that don’t have the features you need? That might be because you’re using products designed for consumers when you need the features, quality, and customizability of industrial-grade technology. In this article, we will take a deep dive into some of the main differences between consumer and industrial SSDs.
 

1. Data Loss Prevention

When your system encounters an unexpected shutdown, your data is at risk, and data is money. When choosing an SSD for industrial applications, you must consider data preservation. One of the most important factors to consider is how long a drive can stay powered following a loss of mains power. Consumer-grade SSDs can only hold emergency residual system power for 2ms, which is not long enough for the drive to write the memory cache to the flash memory during power failures, leading to data loss. With industrial SSDs, such as those with iCell technology, the emergency residual system power is extended to 60ms, meaning data on the SSD is safe.
 

2. Always Available Remote Management

In the industrial world, we use monitoring solutions to analyze, optimize, and maintain our entire infrastructure network, but with traditional consumer-level monitoring solutions, if your system is down, you have no remote access to your drives. Industrial SSDs with OOB remote management technology allow you to manage your devices through the cloud using out-of-band signaling remotely. This enables control even if the system the device is installed in has crashed or the network it is operating on fails. 
 

3. Strict Testing and Quality Control

It’s all too common for consumer-grade SSDs to be dead on arrival (DOA). Unlike consumer-grade hardware, industrial-grade SSDs are put through strict tests before leaving the factory. Testing includes commonly required quality control tests, such as high-low temperature cycling, vibration, power cycling, and burn-in testing.

4. Materials That Don’t Change

In the consumer world, it’s all too common for the materials and parts used in a product to be changed, without prior notice to the customer, all while still using the same model number. This is because consumer products usually don’t have a locked bill of material (BOM), meaning manufacturers can change the materials used to suit their needs. For industrial cases, a change in material can mean incompatibility, especially with flash memory products. It is for this reason that industrial components from companies like Innodisk feature a locked BOM.

5. Experienced Technical Support

Another reason it is important to use industrial-grade SSDs for industrial use cases is support. With consumer-grade hardware, it is the customer’s responsibility to ensure the product is compatible with the system, and install the device correctly. Technical support is almost non-existent, and issues are usually left to the end user to resolve. However, with SSDs from industrial-grade suppliers, there are technical support engineers ready to help and offer support throughout the entire process, from selecting which component is best, to troubleshooting.