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.

The challenge - making ext4 just as reliable as Datalight's Reliance Nitro file system, within limitations of the POSIX specification. Unlike most real world embedded designs, performance and media lifetime are not a consideration for this exercise.

We're constantly on the lookout for ways to help our customers boost performance and improve power efficiency, and often our inspiration comes by way of the conversations we have with them. Recently, several of these discussions highlighted user scenarios where the complexity of the application would benefit from an enhancement to the classic Dynamic Transaction Point™ technology found in our Reliance Nitro file system.

In conversations with the embedded OEMs we work with, a common issue affects almost every manufacturer - the cost of diagnosing and fixing causes of field failure. This impacts time-to-market and pulls resources from development for field diagnostics and post-mortem analysis. This issue is especially relevant due to the following reasons: