the fault-tolerant performance file system for rapid development of reliable devices
Designed to meet the responsiveness needs of devices storing large numbers of files, Reliance Nitro high performance file system improves the speed of file and directory access by several orders of magnitude, while continuing to deliver the rock-solid reliability of its Reliance heritage. The unique combination of tree-based directory architecture, extent based design, and faster atomic transactions, gives a performance benefit for I/O throughput and metadata operations. Dynamic Transaction Point™ technology, found in all Reliance products, gives developers unprecedented control over file system operations. Reliance Nitro is optimized for use on consumer electronics and industrial devices like smartphones, navigation devices, and handheld scanners that cannot compromise reliability or performance to deliver a compelling user experience.
How Reliance Nitro Works
Reliance Nitro is a tree-based transactional file system, built on the Dynamic Transaction Point™ technology of the well-known Datalight Reliance file system. The tree-based metadata management is what gives Reliance Nitro its characteristic fast performance on file operation speeds for volumes with a large number of files.
How Tree-based Metadata Management Works
Trees are used for varying purposes in Reliance Nitro:
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Directory Tree: The purpose of the directory tree is to associate a name with a unique file number within a parent directory. This association is implemented via a tree structure.
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Allocation Tree: The purpose of the allocation tree is to associate allocated blocks with a file as well as to store information about the file itself.
Tree RootNode
Initially, each tree begins with a leaf node known as the RootNode. Once each leaf node becomes full, an intermediate node is added. Intermediate nodes can point to multiple leaf or intermediate nodes.
Leaf Node
Leaf nodes are where the data associated with a key is actually stored.
Intermediate Node
Intermediate nodes provide a method for the tree to grow dynamically. The data associated with intermediate node keys contain a logical block number for a leaf node or intermediate node:
Block Size in Bytes 512 1024 2048
Key's per Intermediate node 41 84 169
Key's per leaf node 17 35 72
Tree Depth Number of Keys
Level 1 17 35 72
Level 2 697 2,940 12,168
Level 3 28,577 246,960 2,056,392
Level 4 1,171,657 20,744,640 347,530,248
Advantages of a tree-based design
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For 512 bytes block size:
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On a linear file system (like TFAT), nodes traversed to access file #28,577 = 28577/8 = 3573
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On a tree-based file system like Reliance Nitro, nodes traversed to access file #28,577 = 3
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For all cases where there are more than 17 files on the device, a tree-based file system will perform better than a linear one
Read the whitepaper:
Achieving Breakthrough Performance with Tree-Based File Systems
Features and Benefits
Product Specifications
Target Configuration
32-bit OS, any CPU, virtually any storage media, 70 KB RAM (typical)
Development System
Windows 32 host; 4 MB of disk space for Reliance; sufficient RAM for development tools
Supported Media
Flash memory, RAM, HDD, Disk-On-Chip, USB Mass Storage, SD/MMC, and eMMC
RAM Memory Required
100 KB to 150 KB (nominal)
Media Volume Size
Each partition (or disk) can be scaled from 100 KB to 32 TB (terabytes)
Max File Size/Name Length
Available free space/1,024 UTF-8 bytes (or OS imposed limits)
Getting started
Do you want to experience how our flash management software and file system can provide you with the reliability and performance that you products need? Contact us to request an evaluation copy.