Success story – Cutting boot time in half for LG Navigator

Tuxera's FlashFX® flash management solutions deliver a superior user experience by reducing boot time.

Fast boot time means satisfied customers

LG Electronics, a well-known manufacturer of consumer electronics based in Korea, created a multimedia-enabled portable navigator for the North American market. The LN790 features a 4.3” LCD screen, Bluetooth hands-free functionality, and video-enabled playback. Ruggedness and fast access to data are important to consumers in this market, so the device was designed to boot directly from a NAND mass storage environment using Windows Embedded Compact (CE).

The challenge

LG product engineers had a difficult time getting the device to boot fast enough using Windows CE’s FAL/FMD flash drivers. At just over two minutes, the startup time did not match LG’s reputation for high-performance consumer devices.

As LG engineers went searching for solutions to the boot speed problem, they discovered that our FlashFX products use a more efficient approach to managing bad blocks than CE’s standard FMD/FAL drivers, which can speed boot time significantly. This difference is especially apparent when the device is using a large NAND disk, because boot time is somewhat proportional to the size of the flash. Why are our FlashFX products more efficient? Startup with FAL requires the driver to read more data as part of its mount sequence, a lengthy process particularly if the disk is large. In contrast, our solutions require a much simpler check of the media to complete the initial mount.

The results

After implementation of our FlashFX solution, LG engineers were delighted to discover that the device’s boot time was cut by more than half. By using our FlashFX solution instead of the native Windows CE drivers, LG designers were able to achieve the performance their customers expect from a premium-quality personal navigator. There was also an additional benefit they hadn’t counted on – support for over 300 flash parts means that the LN790 will be future-proof from flash parts going on allocation, unexpected price fluctuations, and end-of-life issues.

* This customer success story has been updated July 8, 2020. Datalight was originally mentioned as the software provider in this story. As of 2019, Datalight Inc. became a wholly owned subsidiary of Tuxera Inc. Tuxera now owns all of Datalight’s former products, including the ones mentioned in this project. Tuxera is dedicated to providing superior technical know-how in data storage challenges and responsive customer support.

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Tuxera

Tuxera is the leading provider of quality-assured data storage management software and networking technologies. We help people and businesses store and move data reliably, while making file transfers fast and content easily accessible. Our software is at the core of billions of phones, tablets, cars, TV sets, cameras, drones, external storage, routers, spacecraft, IoT devices, and public cloud storage platforms.

Tuxera’s customers include car makers, device manufacturers, industrial equipment manufacturers, data-driven enterprises, and many more. We help them solve complex challenges involving data in all its states – at rest, in use, and in motion. They rely on our software to protect data integrity, ensure data accessibility, improve storage performance, transfer data rapidly and securely, and extend flash memory lifetime in their products and for their projects.