Internal storage memory performance and behavior

9 Mar 2016

As the capacity and type of internal flash storage memory (hard drive) in our product models has changed over time with each generation, so has the performance and behavior. This can affect how application software should be written to handle reading and writing to the hard drive to achieve the best performance, as well as to avoid corruptions that can lead to issues such as described at the following web pages.

 

 

Early product models used volatile program (RAM) memory for most storage. Later models started using non-volatile raw flash storage memory chips. Both provided fast initialization and high performance, but limited capacity and serviceability, as well as occasional timing issues. Later operating system versions from Microsoft also introduced alternative file systems such as described at the following web page.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction-Safe_FAT_File_System

 

Our latest product models provide hard drives that are of higher capacity and are more serviceable. Though it now can take a little longer for the drive to perform initialization before each read/write. Overall performance has increased after initialization. Application software should now be written to use program (RAM) memory to buffer data into packets (such as an array) that can then be written to storage memory in clusters, rather than one bit at a time rapidly and continuously like with previous product models.