OEM customers have told us for years that struggles with NAND supply and lack of standards costs them a great deal of time and money. A shortage or EOL on a key component like NAND flash memory can cause product delivery delays that impact topline revenue and potentially company reputation. What they wish for is a "plug and play" option that lets them multi-source their flash memory.

One of the questions we received at Datalight is whether our software affects the power consumption of embedded devices. Not being power experts ourselves, we found an intern and faculty advisor from our nearby University of Washington to help us out with the process.

Design West 2013 was held last week in San Jose. The phrase of the show was "Internet of Things," and plenty of new hardware was in evidence.

The USB Mass Storage class (also called UMS) is a protocol that allows a device connected through USB (Universal Serial Bus) to become accessible to a host computing device. This allows file transfers between the device and the desktop, as long as the file system used on the device is known to the desktop. One common example of this is the FAT file system.

Last week the UK Journal PC Pro published an interesting article about fast SD cards, with a good description of the SD card Class system. With some clever testing, they showed how six cards performed in a continuous shooting situation.

Recently, we've focused considerable development effort on improving database performance for embedded devices, specifically for Android. This is because Android is a particularly database-centric environment.

Datalight's Reliance Nitro and journaling file systems,such as ext4, are designed to recover from unexpected power interruption. These kinds of "post mortem" recoveries typically consist of determining which files are in which states, and restoring them to the proper working state. Methods like these are fine for recovering from a power failure, but what about a media failure?

Before embedded devices, file systems were designed to work in servers and desktops. Power loss was an infrequent occurrence, so little consideration was given to protecting the data.

Datalight congratulates our integration partners Adeneo and Bsquare for again winning the Microsoft Windows Embedded Excellence Award for 2012!

If you've been following this blog, you've probably noticed a lot of discussion and analysis around eMMC. We've written about the reasons we are so excited about eMMC, but also why the Write Amplification issues caused by eMMC parts are a problem that needs more attention by the industry.