SANTA ANA, Calif., 6 March 2012. STEC Inc. (NASDAQ:STEC) in Santa Ana, Calif., is introducing the MACH16 Slim SATA solid-state drive for rugged, aerospace, and military embedded systems such as military vehicles, transportation systems, GPS systems, medical equipment, and rugged PCs. The new data storage devices offer the same flash management as STEC's enterprise solid-state drives, company officials say.

The device for embedded computing applications uses industry-standard 22-pin SATA cabling that supports JEDEC MO-297 and SFF-8156 specifications, and is a drop-in replacement for a 2.5-inch rotating hard disk or 2.5-inch solid-state drive. The drive consumes as much as 70 percent less power than a hard disk or conventional solid-state drive, and is suitable for small-form-factor embedded computing systems such as Mini-ITX, Pico-ITX, and CompactPCI.

The MACH16 Slim uses STEC's solid-state drive controller and firmware technologies. Other features include:

-- CellCare Technology, which combines flash management, digital signal processing, ECC methods, and other technologies to increase NAND cell endurance and data retention;

-- STEC's secure array of flash elements (SAFE) Technology, which provides mechanisms to recover from NAND flash page-, block-, die-, and chip-failures;

-- STEC's PowerSafe Technology, which provides data backup and recoin in an unplanned power failure;

-- data-path protection and advanced error code correction, which protects critical data from corruption; and

-- advanced wear-leveling, which spreads the writing of each data block evenly across all data blocks.

STEC's MACH16 Slim SATA embedded solid-state drives come in capacities of 25 and 50 gigabytes and support sustained speeds as fast as 245 megabytes per second for sequential 128K read operations, and as fast as 150 megabytes per second for sequential 128K write operations.

For more information contact STEC online at www.stec-inc.com.