Features - Storage Innovations:

CyberKey OVERCOMES FLASH-BASED 'BAD MEMORY' ISSUES

CyberKey has announced it is the first company to develop technology designed to overcome the issues inherent with "bad memory" blocks found on Flash-based storage devices, such as USB drives.

With CyberKey's new patent-pending Dynamic Block Management technology, content and applications stored to a CyberKey avoid the issues common with Flash-based memory devices of corrupted storage blocks, maintaining data integrity and preventing altered data files.

CyberKeys are Universal Serial Bus (USB) storage devices commonly categorized as USB drives that can be connected to personal computers or other electronics devices with a USB port. Such CyberKeys are roughly the size of an adult's "pinky" finger, range in storage capacities from 16MB to 1GB of solid state flash memory, and are designed to provide users with simple and secure application functionality and data portability, making the CyberKey the world's most secure USB storage device.

"Dynamic Block Management makes it possible for a CyberKey to automatically detect and 'map around' bad or marginal data storage blocks in its flash memory," said Jim Plant, president and chief executive officer of CyberKey. "With this technology in place, data is only written into a CyberKey's data storage blocks which are known to be good. As a result, the level of data integrity for the device is not compromised."

Although flash memory is generally known for its reliability, there can be areas of flash memory that will not function properly, even factory-fresh chips have known bad blocks. As a result, a number of manufacturers utilize Error Correcting Codes (ECCs) in order to provide some measure of data integrity in flash memory and flash memory devices. Despite this effort, however, all data blocks continue to be used on such flash memory chips, which means data may still be written to blocks classified by the vendor as questionable or failed.

"ECCs alone don't really do that much to safeguard your data on a flash memory device and that's a big problem," said Tim Tabor, CyberKey product engineer. "When ECCs are used with Dynamic Block Management, however, the two complement each other very nicely. Dynamic Block Management is the key to making flash memory devices such as CyberKeys as safe and reliable as possible with the available technology."

Dynamic Block Management is available for all existing CyberKey USB drives via a software download from the CyberKey Web site, and will be loaded on all CyberKeys shipped in the future.

"This is a great development for CyberKey and USB storage device users," Plant said. "As data capacity and the popularity of USB drives and flash storage devices continue to grow, it will be increasingly important for users to know that their saved data and applications will be both safe and accessible. Dynamic Block Management is our first step to ensure this with all CyberKeys shipped by our company."

More information about Dynamic Block Management is available online at www.cyberkeycorp.com/about/technology.htm.