A need of the advancement in storage technology
Gone are the days where we had clicking noises on our desktops, laptops and many more machines. Now is the age of silence yet with incredible performance. Let us talk about the emerging technology of management of files.
Last Friday, I came up with a search on my local drive to find a song and voila, I got it in a certain location. The file system thing has a big history and comes up from the old Unix days. These file systems are actually an abstraction that are made for the ease of the user, but in reality there is nothing called a file. The file in real is actually the abstraction that separates certain sectors or blocks to store a digital content and creates the link on a table where the entries are placed so that it can be shown to us as a file.
We all have heard about FAT and NTFS file systems. These file systems are actually made for the spinning disc based drives. We have had days when we had floppies, zip drives and hard disk drives, where we had spindle that could drive a platter of discs where we used to store data. Since the whole system was based on a revolving disc technology we required a very efficient file system to handle the content on those discs, where we came up with the idea of cylinder, head and sector system. We again managed to convert such CHS system into logical block addressing technique. But that's a tale now. We have landed into a new era of storing digital content. Semiconductor memory chips are now cheaper and less power consuming as we have advanced so much in the fabricating technology. So the days of SSD (Solid State Drives) are on the information highway already. Now for the very efficient throughput of the flash based devices we need a very new file system that can handle these flash blocks efficiently and effectively. Here we propose a block-based file handling system.
A solid-state drive is made up of arrays of flash chips controlled by and addressing technique and a very efficient and fast microcontroller. These flash chips are NAND chips or nor chips depending upon the manufacturing technology. NOR chips do offer random access but doesn't offer random rewrite and erasure. NAND chip offers only sequential access.
Beside these features, there are certain limitations to the flash based memory. These limitations of flash based memory make us to develop and use a block based file system which has a good support for flash based systems which can ensure for long run and less error on the overall system. The limitations are :
i. Block Erasure
ii. Memory Wear
Source: Electronics Project Club Magazine
Gone are the days where we had clicking noises on our desktops, laptops and many more machines. Now is the age of silence yet with incredible performance. Let us talk about the emerging technology of management of files.
Last Friday, I came up with a search on my local drive to find a song and voila, I got it in a certain location. The file system thing has a big history and comes up from the old Unix days. These file systems are actually an abstraction that are made for the ease of the user, but in reality there is nothing called a file. The file in real is actually the abstraction that separates certain sectors or blocks to store a digital content and creates the link on a table where the entries are placed so that it can be shown to us as a file.
We all have heard about FAT and NTFS file systems. These file systems are actually made for the spinning disc based drives. We have had days when we had floppies, zip drives and hard disk drives, where we had spindle that could drive a platter of discs where we used to store data. Since the whole system was based on a revolving disc technology we required a very efficient file system to handle the content on those discs, where we came up with the idea of cylinder, head and sector system. We again managed to convert such CHS system into logical block addressing technique. But that's a tale now. We have landed into a new era of storing digital content. Semiconductor memory chips are now cheaper and less power consuming as we have advanced so much in the fabricating technology. So the days of SSD (Solid State Drives) are on the information highway already. Now for the very efficient throughput of the flash based devices we need a very new file system that can handle these flash blocks efficiently and effectively. Here we propose a block-based file handling system.
A solid-state drive is made up of arrays of flash chips controlled by and addressing technique and a very efficient and fast microcontroller. These flash chips are NAND chips or nor chips depending upon the manufacturing technology. NOR chips do offer random access but doesn't offer random rewrite and erasure. NAND chip offers only sequential access.
Beside these features, there are certain limitations to the flash based memory. These limitations of flash based memory make us to develop and use a block based file system which has a good support for flash based systems which can ensure for long run and less error on the overall system. The limitations are :
i. Block Erasure
ii. Memory Wear
Source: Electronics Project Club Magazine
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