Data Matters - A blog about flash memory

Increase Capacity, Reduce Cost: Benefits of NAND Flash -Wind River and Datalight Webinar

michele — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 18:38:35 +0000

Join us March 18^th at 11am PDT as Datalight CEO Roy Sherrill and Wind River Product Manager Bill Graham weigh the pros and cons of switching to NAND. Maximize the usability and efficiency of your device memory by understanding all the considerations that go into integrating a NAND flash with your device’s software. Learn more and reserve your spot today as space is limited.

LinkedIn Group Rants About Vendor-supplied Drivers

michele — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 22:01:04 +0000

If you’re on LinkedIn, check out the Realtime Embedded Engineering Group for an interesting and often lively discussion of the issues facing our community. We particularly enjoyed reading the recent thread about the drivers included by hardware vendors being less than optimal for most flash parts. The consensus can be summed up in one blogger’s statement;

“What many silicon vendors refer to as a ‘driver’ is nothing more than the code left over by their inhouse hardware development team. This code typically exercises just a small subset of the device capabilities (or whatever they were working on last) and doesn’t even come close to meeting the definition (or spirit) of a general purpose device driver.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. A lot of our time in developing our FlashFX family of flash memory drivers is spent ensuring completeness, reliability and portability to a wide variety of CPUs and operating systems.

InHand Chooses FlashFX Pro for Fingertip Modules

RobHart — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:45:16 +0000

InHand’s development platforms are known in the embedded industry for their generous list of features, fast time-to-market, and solid performance. Recently, when a customer’s unusual flash configuration began causing corruption issues related to the default flash driver on Windows CE, InHand turned to Datalight FlashFX Pro, with immediate results. The InHand team was so impressed with the ease of implementation and improved flexibility of FlashFX Pro, that they decided to include it with every Fingertip4 and Fingertip5 module they sell. Continue reading for more about InHand’sDatalight FlashFX Pro experience with .

Reliability on Windows CE 6.0

michele — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 21:48:23 +0000

Watch Rob Hart demonstrating the Datalight flash file system on the Beagle Board with Windows CE 6.0

Reliance Nitro Makes an Impact

michele — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:55:04 +0000

Last week one of our customers sent the following evaluation report in an email to Datalight support staff:

“Right now we are in the process of testing the impact of Reliance Nitro in our application. Apparently, we noticed some boost in the performance: faster write speed, significant speed increase of transaction point creation, faster read speed, and significantly faster directory read (we typically have 1000 files in the directory). So, in conclusion, the overall performance of the system is boosted quite significantly.”

Another real world example of how Reliance Nitro boosts performance in directories with a large number of files. To learn how Reliance Nitro does it, check out the whitepaper.

Motorola Introduces the Future of Mobile Computing Today

michele — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 19:25:38 +0000

We were excited to read about this week’s release of the new Motorola MC9500. This slick new member of the MC9000 rugged mobile computer family includes features like swappable keypad, modular 3.5G WAN with support for GSM HSDPA or CDMA-EVDO Rev A wireless broadband connectivity in one device, screen orientation sensor, battery lifespan management and lots of other bells and whistles. We were even more excited to see a report from Computerworld that Fedex has already ordered 100,000 units!

FAT: May Be Exchangeable but Still Not Your Friend

michele — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 18:07:17 +0000

Open the box containing your new electronic device and you can count on the presence of one other item tucked in under the plastic bags, tie wraps, and tiny, barely readable user manuals: the umbilical cord. According to a recent Nielsen/Netratings report, 89.4% of us connect our gadgets to a Windows host machine, underscoring how crucial it is for manufacturers to consider file system compatibility with the Windows desktop. The ubiquity of the FAT (File Allocation Table) file system makes exchangeability easy for those of us who create embedded designs, but FAT is also the cause of a lot that goes wrong with these devices. If you design embedded systems for a living, FAT is like a friend who is always there for you, but who undermines your most brilliant work and holds your designs back from embedded greatness.

FAT, oft updated since being developed by Bill Gates and Marc McDonald for late 1970’s desktop computing, still uses the same basic architecture. As a result, many of its original problems are still with us. For designers in the embedded space, the quirks of this clunky and aging file system are familiar and particularly problematic: corruption when power is cut, excessive fragmentation causing slug-like performance, and wasted disk space due to inefficient memory allocation. Corruption on FAT is especially noticeable on removable media when the media is removed while write operations are happening.

Reliable, better performing options such as ext3 are out there, but files are not useable by a Windows host machine, a deal breaker for most embedded OEMs (remember the 89.4%?). At Datalight, we’ve addressed the issue with our Reliance file system and a simple driver called RWD (Reliance Windows Driver). Once loaded on the host machine, RWD allows Reliance-formatted media to be read and used on the Windows host. With Reliance and RWD, OEMs and their customers no longer have to choose between reliability, performance and exchangeability. Check out the press release announcing our new RWD version 2.0 with support for Windows Vista.

Datalight RWD 2.0 Connects Reliable Embedded Data to Systems Running Windows Vista

michele — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 15:49:32 +0000

Datalight announced today the release of RWD 2.0, an installable driver which makes data from devices using its acclaimed Reliance file system exchangeable with computers running Windows Vista or Windows XP operating systems. Read full press release

Application Ecosystems on Devices

MayurKamat — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:37:22 +0000

While the software that we develop integrates at system level in devices, we do keep an eye open for developments happening at the application level primarily because the heavy data storage use most modern applications make. Understanding what kind of applications are making headway in the market helps us determine the type of data profile to expect at the file system and flash management level. This helps is in creating new system level functionality that benefits all applications. One example of this is the work done in Reliance Nitro. We observed a lot of device applications and how they use files. We found that apart from some data logging / music playback apps, most apps do not indulge in sequential reads and writes that often. Most of the time, apps are primarily engaged in file operations (file open being the most common). Hence we designed the tree-based metadata architecture in Reliance Nitro to provide radical performance improvements in the file operation speeds.

When we talk about apps on devices, we cannot ignore the 800-pound gorilla – the Apple Appstore. The appstore has created a huge ecosystem for apps on the iPhone and the iPod touch by having a one-stop shop for discovering, reviewing and purchasing apps. Combine this usability with the popularity of the hardware, the app ecosystem has blossomed which has forced rivals to pay attention and start something similar of their own. Google’s Android marketplace is probably the next biggest player while Palm, Microsoft and Nokia are just getting started. While Apple does indeed have a head start of 12-14 months, what is interesting to note is the huge difference between it and its closest rival. This article by Fierce Developer highlights the significant difference in revenue that app developers are seeing on the Apple v/s the Android platform.

Source: AdMob’s July 2009 Mobile Metrics Report

What do these stats mean for device developers? In order to catch up or surpass Apple, innovation needs to happen on multiple fronts

1. Device hardware: Apple innovated with the capacitive touchscreen and no-keyboard design. OEMs need to find the next game changer on the hardware front

2. Device user experience: Hardware on its own does not win over users. There have been several iPhone competitors who have had better hardware of paper but without matching software capabilities, the devices have not met with spectacular success. Using an optimized data storage stack can help improve device responsiveness which users rank as one of their top requirements. Creating new simple user interface paradigms will also be critical.

3. Developer support: Use of standard tools and languages for writing apps along with a low cost of entry is critical to attract app developers to your platform

4. Discovery and purchase of apps: How do users of your devices find and purchase apps? How can you do it better and faster? What is the average price-point for the buyer profile of your device. All of these are critical questions to answer before creating an app store.

It will need strong execution on all of the above fronts for device manufacturers to catch up to the Apple success. We will be keeping an eye open to developments here; look out for further postings on this topic in the future.

Seen & Heard at the Flash Memory Summit

RobHart — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 04:38:11 +0000

Attendance at FMS broke records for the fourth year in a row – truly remarkable, given our current economic situation. I think even the organizers were pleasantly surprised by the confirmation that FMS is now the venue of choice for flash industry leaders to come together and for the rest of the industry to learn what is new in the world of flash technology. As a sponsor of the show since its inception, Datalight contributed to the Summit by organizing a half-day executive update, presenting on wear-leveling, moderating a round-table on endurance at the beer & pizza forum, and delivering a product demonstration at the FMS Theater.
Once again SSDs, thought by many to be the savior of the beleaguered flash industry, dominated the agenda. This year talk of application-specific SSDs was everywhere, specifically optimizations for interfaces like SAS, SATA, and fiber channel.

Presumably, the idea behind application-specific SSDs is to drive faster adoption by tuning them for the use cases presented by different applications. For example, in a random write intensive application, additional RAM may be added to mitigate lackluster random write performance by buffering writes.
As expected, there was a fair amount of preaching to the choir about the benefits of SSDs over HDDs, including read/write performance and the power savings. Intel touted 17% longer battery life and reduced failure rates (less than .5% for SSD vs. 5% for HDD). Other manufacturer’s boasted instant-on boot time, smaller footprint, and lower DRAM requirements.

On the topic of barriers to adoption, SSDs were declared still too expensive for mass market appeal. Also, many of the benefits promised by SSDs are being undone by bottlenecks in the OS (and file system!). As a result, it was postulated that SSDs will cannibalize 15k RPM HDDs, where customers are willing to pay a premium for speed, rather than replacing HDDs as a whole, at least in the short term,
In the emerging technologies track, 3-D NAND was promoted by both Micron and SanDisk, in part because they are able to leverage the technology used to build DRAM for manufacturing 3-D NAND, making it easier and cheaper to produce. It was particularly interesting to hear SanDisk say that 4 bit per cell will have limited application in the future, especially since it had been speculated that the 4 b/c technology was a key reason for them to acquire M-Systems. PCM and FeRAM were also discussed as next generation flash technologies. Overall, we were impressed by the level of participation from across the industry and we’re already looking forward to next year’s Summit!