Non Siemens MMC

YoungWint

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Dec 2012
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East Midlands
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Is it possible to use a non Siemens memory card with a Siemens PLC? And if so how?

Would thought you should be able to configure any Memory Card but not sure on this so would like any advice.
 
It is special Siemens formatting, and there is a lot of hidden data stored in the background on the card. What Siemens sells as an 8MB MMC turns into something like a 64MB MMC if it is windows formatted. However, at that point it can't be used in a PLC anymore. Siemens says that the their MMC uses higher quality flash memory than consumer grade stuff. Doesn't make it worth the price, but ya gotta have it. I'm not saying its 100% impossible to use a third party MMC, but you would really need to know what you are doing to format it properly. Essentially, you'd have to already be working for Siemens as a developer.

The newer PLC's, the 1200 and 1500, have SD cards that are more reasonably priced. Still nowhere near consumer grade cards, and still required to be a Siemens card, but not nearly as bad. They can also be read in windows, so you don't need the special Siemens MMC prommer to clear it.
 
Industrial flash memory is more than just hardier than consumer grade. Usually it contains controller circuitry to support multiple partitions or special forms of data redundancy. For instance, I know that B&R uses CF cards that have special support for multiple partitions. Using consumer grade CF cards in a B&R PLC will usually result in failure to boot up after a while because the partition tables become corrupted by the error correction in consumer cards (though B&R doesn't prevent you from using non-industrial CF cards if you need to).
 
All memory cards have special registers defined that describe the card capabilities. These registers are read-only: they cannot be modified. Most manufacturers rely on a standard set of registers, but some companies, like Siemens, also look at specific registers to ensure a particular type card is installed.

Siemens looks for data in particular registers to identify the card uniquely as a Siemens card. There is no way to work around this: you must purchase a memory card that was originally manufactured with the special Siemens identification. Too bad, because I don't believe there are any other unique features to these cards other than their supposed 'high reliability'.
 
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