Up to 64 Gbytes of high-speed storage is possible with the PBOD, which is a flash-disk PMC or XMC card. Developed by Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing, the PBOD is for applications in harsh environments where extreme temperature, shock, or vibration make the use of mechanical hard-disk drives impractical.
The PBOD is supported in systems that have USB flash drives. It appears to the host operating system as up to eight USB flash drives that can be operated independently at rates over 10MB/s each. By using RAID software, data rates exceeding 40MB/s can be sustained. Also, the array of flash drives appears as a single logical drive.
Advanced PBOD features include ECC NAND flash correction to ensure 1 bit per 256 correction and 2-bit error detection. In addition, the drive’s lifetime is extended through use of wear-leveling technology, which ensures that program/erase cycles are distributed across the media. This eliminates premature device failure resulting from frequent erase cycles on the same flashmemory block.