Datalight Flash File System for WindowsCE

Improving performance and lowering BOM costs are at the top of the requirements list for many embedded development projects. Of course, reliability and time to market are on the list, too and can’t be sacrificed. Datalight FlashFX Pro NAND and NOR flash drivers and Reliance high-integrity flash file system help you to add performance and flexibility to your next CE design, with pre-written porting for Windows CE and out-of-box support for over 200 flash parts. The Datalight flash file system platform is proven to outperform native Windows CE solutions by a factor of three to one!

Unlike FAT, our flash file system was designed from the ground up for the rugged environment of embedded systems. While FAT attempts reliability through costly journal redundancy, Datalight Reliance enables ultimate performance and fail-safe data protection through Dynamic Transaction Point technology (DTPT). DTPT allows you to choose the exact frequency and/or trigger points for data backup, giving you absolute control over the balance between performance and reliability for your use-case.

 Below are specifics on the test environment we used. For more detailed product information, please visit:

www.datalight.com/products

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Reliance Completed Scenario - More Than Twice as Fast
  • Reliance with timed transactions completes the scenario in 45% of the time required by T-exFAT
  • None of the native FAT file systems offer scenario-specific performance tuning


FlashFX Pro: Fastest Sequential I/O Regardless of File System Used

FlashFX Pro Improves Performance for All I/O Operations

Regardless of file system choice, FlashFX Pro consistently offers faster performance than native Windows CE 6.0 solution (MSFlash) – as much as 4.5 times faster for sequential writes when used with T-exFAT.

FlashFX Pro with: Sequential Write Random Write Sequential Read Random Read
FAT16 188% faster 300% faster 11% faster 20% faster
T-exFAT 450% faster 311% faster 14% faster 29% faster

FlashFX Pro Performance Relative to MSFlash


Test Environment Details: Hardware

OS Windows CE 6.0
Platform BSQUARE PXA3xx Development Platform
Processor Marvell PXA320 (XScale)
Storage 128 MB Samsung NAND (part K9F1G08Q0M)
Block device driver MSFlash (included in the BSQUARE binary BSP), or FlashFX Pro v3.10 build 1513
Disk cache CE disk cache enabled; Reliance disk cache is 128 sectors; FAT and exFAT disk cache is 128 sectors (32 sectors for FAT, 96 sectors for data).

The purpose of this analysis is to compare the performance and functional characteristics of Datalight FlashFX Pro and Reliance, versus the native block driver and file system options available on Windows CE 6.0.

About the Testing Tools:

All performance data was gathered with FSIOTEST, a Datalight proprietary tool that was developed to test general file system functionality and performance.  FSIOTEST will run on top of any OS, hardware platform, or file system which has a generic file I/O interface and supports a hierarchical directory structure.


Test Environment Details: File Systems

The Windows CE 6.0 and Datalight Reliance file systems were tested in several different configurations.  The abbreviations, used throughout this document, are described below.

FAT16 FAT file system in its default FAT16 mode
exFAT The default configuration for exFAT (new in Windows CE 6.0)
T-exFAT exFAT with TFAT functionality enabled
T-exFAT-TD

exFAT with TFAT and the “TransactData” option enabled. 

This FAT configuration is most equivalent to Reliance in terms of reliability.
Reliance Datalight Reliance, v3.00 Build 1218 with Automatic Transaction mode, (the default); transacts on most file operations, except for data writes.
REL-TOW Automatic Transaction mode, using the default transaction mask, but with “TransactOnWrite” enabled.

REL-1000

REL-100

REL-10		 Timed Transaction mode with a 1000, 100, or 10 ms interval.  All Automatic Transactions except “volume full” and “flush” are turned off.