Getting your SSD choice right matters in any industry. In aviation, space and defence, it can decide whether a mission succeeds.
These are environments where you cannot swap a failed drive mid-flight, where the data on board may be classified, and where the system you are designing today still has to be supportable in twenty years. Standard commercial memory is not built for any of that.
This guide walks you through what actually matters when you specify a solid-state drive for an aircraft, a satellite, a ground vehicle or a defence platform, so you can brief your supplier with confidence and avoid an expensive redesign later.
Start with where the drive sits in your system
Before you look at a single datasheet, be clear about the job the drive is doing. The requirements change enormously depending on the role.
Flight control and navigation. Fast, predictable access matters more than raw capacity. The drive has to deliver data on demand for real-time decisions, every time.
Communication and surveillance. Sustained write performance is the priority, because these systems generate data continuously and cannot pause while storage catches up.
Remote sensing and satellite imaging. High-resolution capture pushes both capacity and write speed, often in the harshest radiation environment of the lot.
Mission and flight data logging. Endurance is the deciding factor here. A logging drive is written to constantly across its whole life, which wears NAND far faster than a mostly read workload.
UAV and drone payloads. Size, weight and power dominate every other consideration, and the drive still has to survive launch shock and vibration.
Write this down before you shortlist anything. Most specification mistakes come from treating all storage in a platform as one requirement when it is really four or five.
Let the environment set the specification
Aviation, space and defence throw up conditions that would destroy a consumer drive within weeks.
Temperature. Wide operating ranges are essential, and you need to check the rating covers your worst case, not the typical case. Ask for the specified range rather than a general claim of industrial grade.
Shock and vibration. Launch, ejection, tracked vehicles and airframe resonance all put sustained mechanical stress through the drive. Solid state helps, but board-level construction, component staking and connector choice decide whether it holds up.
Altitude and pressure. Low pressure changes how heat leaves the drive. A part that runs cool on a bench can throttle or fail at altitude.
Moisture, dust and chemical exposure. Ground and naval platforms rarely offer a clean, dry rack.
Radiation is the one that catches people out
If any part of your application goes above the atmosphere, radiation deserves its own conversation.
Cosmic rays and trapped particles cause single-event upsets, where a stray particle flips a bit in memory or in the controller. Left unmanaged, that shows up as file corruption, firmware crashes or a silent data error you do not spot until the analysis stage.
Radiation-hardened drives are built to tolerate this, combining shielded and hardened components with error checking and correction that catches and repairs bit flips before they reach your application. Foremay’s InterStellar range was developed for exactly this problem.
The range gives you a useful sense of what a genuine space-grade specification looks like. Its Graded-Z shielding architecture brings a raw 10,000 krad exposure down to a manageable 500 krad threshold, and the drives are rated to 500 krad (Si) total ionising dose with a linear energy transfer threshold up to 100 MeV·cm²/mg. Thermal management is specified from -55°C to +125°C.
Flight heritage answers a question no datasheet can. Foremay drives are in service on NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover and across multiple LEO and GEO satellite programmes, as well as in UAV systems and manned aerospace reconnaissance systems. Hardware that has already survived launch and is still returning data from the surface of Mars gives you a level of confidence that a test report on its own cannot.
For anything destined for orbit, ask your supplier directly what total ionising dose the drive is rated for and how single event upsets are handled. A drive that has never been characterised for radiation is not a space drive, whatever the marketing says.
Reliability and endurance across a very long life
Aerospace and defence programmes are measured in decades, and your storage has to keep pace.
Error checking and correction. Advanced error-correcting code detects and repairs data corruption before it propagates. In safety-critical systems, this is not optional.
Wear levelling. Good wear levelling spreads writes evenly across the NAND, so no single block wears out early. On a high write logging application, this can be the difference between years and months.
Endurance rating. Ask for terabytes written, or drive writes per day, and check it against your real duty cycle rather than an assumed one.
Power loss protection. Aircraft and vehicle power is not clean. A drive that loses power mid-write without protection can corrupt data that was already safely committed.
Performance that matches the task
There is no point specifying a drive that survives the environment but cannot do the job.
Most aerospace and defence applications need fast, consistent read and write speeds so large volumes of data move without lag. What matters more than peak figures is sustained performance under load and predictable latency. A drive that posts an impressive headline number then throttles after ninety seconds is no use to a surveillance system that writes continuously for six hours.
Ask for sustained sequential figures at your operating temperature, not the best-case bench number.
Capacity deserves the same scrutiny. Rugged and space-grade drives once meant accepting a fraction of the capacity available commercially, and that gap has closed. Foremay’s range now runs to 32 TB, so a high-resolution imaging or surveillance payload rarely forces you back towards a commercial part simply to get the storage you need.
Security you can stand behind
In defence, security is not a feature you add at the end. It is a design constraint from the first sketch.
Hardware encryption. Self-encrypting drives handle AES encryption in hardware, so data is unreadable without the key and performance is not compromised.
Secure erase and sanitisation. You need a reliable way to destroy data when a drive is decommissioned, or a platform is at risk of capture. Check the method meets your customer’s standard, not just that the feature exists.
Write protection. Where data must not be altered after capture, write-once storage protects the evidential integrity of what you recorded.
Tamper detection and physical protection. Some drives alert you to attempts to open or interfere with them, and destructive options exist where the threat model demands it.
Access control. Separating the key from the drive is one of the oldest and most effective defence security patterns. Crypto ignition keys and removable memory tokens let you render a platform useless to anyone without the key. Datakey tokens are in service with NATO member armed forces, and we can talk through the details under NDA.
Standards and certification
Certification is often what turns a good technical choice into an approvable one.
Depending on your application, you may be working to environmental qualification under RTCA DO-160, environmental engineering under MIL-STD-810G, component-level testing under MIL-STD-883, or European space standards under ECSS. MIL-STD-810G is the one that comes up most often for shock, vibration and temperature, and it is the benchmark Foremay’s rugged drives are built to exceed. On the quality side, ISO 9001 and the aerospace-specific AS9100 tell you how the manufacturer controls its processes.
Two practical points are worth remembering. First, a drive is rarely certified on its own; it is qualified as part of your system, so what you need from a supplier is the test evidence that supports your qualification. Second, ask about traceability. Knowing exactly which lot your components came from matters enormously when something needs investigating years later.
Size, weight and power
Space and power budgets are tight in almost every airborne application, and every gram carries a cost over a platform’s life.
Check the form factor works with your enclosure and connector layout before you fall in love with the specification. Check power draw in active, idle and peak states, because a drive that spikes hard on write can push a marginal power budget over the edge in a UAV or a satellite.
Legacy systems and long-term supply
This is where a lot of aerospace and defence projects come unstuck, and it is the reason many of our customers come to us in the first place.
Your platform may well use interfaces that the consumer market abandoned years ago. PATA and older SATA generations are still very much alive in fielded systems, and finding a supplier who will still build to them is genuinely difficult. A drive that integrates cleanly with your existing hardware saves you a qualification cycle you had not budgeted for.
Obsolescence is the related risk. Commercial NAND product cycles run to a couple of years. Your platform runs to twenty or thirty. If your supplier changes the controller or the flash without telling you, you have a requalification exercise on your hands and possibly a grounded fleet. Ask about change notification, lifetime buy options and long-term availability commitments before you commit to a part, and get the answer in writing.
Choosing who you buy from
The manufacturer and the distributor behind your drive matter as much as the drive itself.
Look for a proven record in your sector, real engineering support rather than a price list, willingness to adapt a design when a standard part is close but not quite right, and a genuine commitment to supporting the part for the life of your programme. Ask for specifics rather than assurances, because a manufacturer that can name the programmes its drives already fly on is giving you evidence.
Where the drive is designed and built is worth asking about too. In defence procurement, supply chain provenance is increasingly part of the conversation rather than a footnote. Foremay carries out its final assembly and its controller design and manufacture in the United States, with a Californian design engineering team, which for some programmes is the deciding factor rather than a nice-to-have.
At Nexus, we have supplied secure and rugged memory into defence, aerospace and space applications since 1987, and we are the appointed Foremay partner for the whole of Europe, including Switzerland and Norway. Our team works as application engineers, which means we help you select, embed and integrate the right drive rather than simply shipping a box. Where a standard product does not fit, we work with our manufacturing partners to adapt a proven design without the cost of full custom development.
A short checklist before you commit
- You have defined the workload for each storage function in the platform separately.
- The temperature, shock, vibration and radiation ratings cover your worst case.
- Endurance has been checked against your real duty cycle.
- The security features meet your customer’s standard, and you have evidence.
- The form factor, interface and power draw fit the design as it stands.
- You have a written answer on change notification and long-term availability.
- Your supplier can provide the test evidence your qualification will need.
Frequently asked questions
What makes an SSD military grade?
There is no single certification that confers the term. In practice, it describes drives built and tested for military environmental and security requirements, typically covering wide temperature operation, shock and vibration tolerance, hardware encryption, secure erase and controlled long-term supply. Always ask which specific standards a drive has been tested against.
Do I need a radiation-hardened SSD?
Only if your application operates above the atmosphere or in another elevated radiation environment. For airborne and ground applications, a rugged industrial drive with strong error correction is normally the right answer. For orbit, radiation hardening is essential.
Which programmes have Foremay drives flown on?
Foremay drives are in service on NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover, on multiple LEO and GEO satellite programmes, in UAV systems and in manned aerospace reconnaissance systems. That spread matters as much as any single programme, because it covers deep space, orbit and airborne use rather than one environment. Ask any supplier the same question, because a drive that has already done the job is evidence in a way a test report is not.
Can I use an industrial SSD instead of a military-grade one?
Sometimes, it can be a sensible way to control cost. It depends on whether your environmental extremes, security obligations, and supply life requirements are genuinely covered. This is worth a conversation before you decide, because getting it wrong is far more expensive than asking.
How long can I expect a drive to stay available?
That depends entirely on your supplier. Consumer parts can disappear in eighteen months. Industrial and military-grade parts from manufacturers committed to long life cycles can be supported for many years, but you need that commitment confirmed rather than assumed.
Talk it through with us
If you are specifying storage for an aviation, space or defence application, we would rather have the conversation early than fix a specification later.
Take a look at our range of Foremay military-grade SSDs, or get in touch and talk it through with one of our engineers. Call 01794 301439 or email info@nexusindustrialmemory.com and we will help you get the specification right the first time.