Datalight FlashFX and Reliance

Although using ATA cards or SD cards is often a comfortable solution for mass storage devices, there can be situation, when it is better to connect flash chips directly on your board. Using onboard flash has the advantage that your disks are shock resistant. Possibly such a solution may be even more cost effective than the alternatives.

Windows CE already contains a flash driver, but sometimes it does not fully meet the requirements of board manufacturers. A critical situation appears when you turn off the hardware while you are writing something or when a compaction process is taking place. As a result, you may loose data or your disk may even get corrupted.

Another problem is the evolution of flash technologies in the recent years. Todate, the cost of a 2GB NAND flash is already very low. The density of flash chips is increasing exponential so that people are discussing whether flash based devices will replace the well-known hard disks in the future.

Flash file systems may have big problems to handle such large devices. There is so much data to organize that older flash file systems are becoming slow. The bigger the device, the more data you have already written to the disk, the more time it takes to mount or restructure the disk.

Since the mid nineties, we are working with Datalight products. During that time we have implemented dozens of projects, mostly with NOR devices but some also with NAND flashs. In our last NAND project with a 2GB chip, we achieved to mount a chip somewhere below 50ms.

We can offer you to take advantage of our experience with Datalight products. We can help you to adapt FlashFX to your environment. This is including the adaptation to your hardware, the integration of unknown flash devices or even an adaptation to your operating system. Datalight already ofters support for most well known operating systems. If you are using an unsupported, more exotic OS, we can help you to integrate the FlashFX driver.

Besides the flash file system FlashFX. Datalight also offers a proprietary file system called Reliance, that concentrates on systems where a sudden power-loss can happen. Using Reliance, you never have to run ScanDisk anymore. Compared to TFFS of Microsoft, Reliance has advantages regarding performance and safety. In case you want to use Reliance on a not yet supported OS, we can help you to integrate it.