SD card Validation Testing Supports SafeFAT

New York, NY and Budapest, Hungary – SD card Validation Testing Supports SafeFAT

SafeFAT, HCC’s failsafe FAT12/16/32 file system, is now supported by HCC-Embedded’s SD card validation program. Under this program, HCC ensures that any card that passes the validation tests is suitable for use with the SafeFAT file system.

SD cards (including MMC, SDv2 and SDHC cards) are hugely successful storage devices; they are available everywhere. By and large they have been designed for the consumer electronics market and optimized for speed rather than reliability. Moreover, most manufacturers do not state clearly the working parameters of their cards.

When using a physical storage medium with a reliable file system, the file system must always know what capabilities it requires from the storage medium. For instance, if the device has a large internal cache, can the sequence of written data be guaranteed? If not, what level of randomness is allowed for a file system to be able to guarantee all is well?

Clearly no file system can withstand having an unlimited amount of data written in a random order if a power or reset condition may occur. But since the internal workings of the cards are hidden, their correct behavior must be established before we can consider a complete system as reliable.

HCC has specified the service level that its systems require of the physical media. A thorough test suite has been developed to exercise SD cards for up to a week to prove that they handle resets cleanly during write operations, and that the SafeFAT file system can truly be termed “failsafe” when used with the target card.

With SafeFAT it is now uniquely possible to have a completely tested system from the file system API down to and including the physical storage media, and to have confidence that valuable data will not be damaged by an unexpected error condition.

Contact data:
Bernard Mushinsky
HCC-Embedded
+1-212-734-1345 Voice
info@hcc-embedded.com
www.hcc-embedded.com