It’s important for car makers and Tier-1 suppliers to choose their file system implementations wisely. File systems impact read and write performance of the storage, the integrity of the data stored, flash endurance or the lifetime of the memory hardware, and data and storage interoperability. Specific factors that affect file system performance include file size, device partitioning, or the file system implementations themselves. One additional factor Tuxera is currently testing is how fragmentation affects flash performance and lifetime.

Fragmentation happens when a file system lays out files in non-contiguous parts, or fragments. It generally occurs because there’s no space left to write new file content next to older file content. Some recent groundbreaking studies into flash memory performance have shown that fragmentation is a bottleneck for or cause for degrading performance. It’s also a factor we’ve currently been testing in our performance benchmarking lab.