Trustworthy Systems

SD cards and filesystems for embedded systems

Authors

Peter Chubb

NICTA

Abstract

Modern embedded systems (such as your Android phone) extensively use SD cards for secondary storage.

You can buy a cheap 32G microSD card for under $16 --- or you can spend $100s on an ultra-high-speed card.

Does it make a difference to your phone's performance? Can filesystems be tweaked to get better performance on cheap cards?

We've been benchmarking some cards, with different filesystems (including the new F2FS that is intended for optimal performance on SD cards) on a variety of embedded systems.

Short answer: it makes a difference, but you can get 90% of the bang for 15% of the buck if you're prepared for a bit of work.

BibTeX Entry

  @misc{Chubb_15,
    address          = {Auckland, NZ},
    author           = {Chubb, Peter},
    booktitle        = {Linux.conf.au},
    month            = jan,
    note             = {linux.conf.au},
    slides           = {https://trustworthy.systems/publications/nicta_slides/8311.pdf},
    title            = {{SD} Cards and filesystems for Embedded Systems},
    video            = {http://youtu.be/K3zb6p0thQU},
    year             = {2015}
  }

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