Tuxera flash testing service
Tuxera Flash Testing Service provides customers with independent guidance in order to calculate real-world utilization of flash storage, potentially saving in bill of materials costs while lowering testing overhead for the customer. Complex system level test cases provide insights beyond standardized testing on the flash devices behavior in customer use case and identifies possible failure points early in the development phase.
Lifetime testing
Lifetime testing of a flash device using file system-based workloads, which simulates normal use of a device with customizable, heavily concurrent workloads. With our lifetime testing, we can test the physical parameters of the flash cell, such as how many write cycles are writeable in different flash technologies. The workload testing is done with our proprietary workload simulator, which can be used to generate a wide range of complex workloads for lifetime and performance testing that reflect the customer use case. While normally lifetime testing is done with fixed workloads, with Tuxera Flash Testing Service, we provide customizable workloads, where the file system is in charge of how data is being allocated, as in a real life use case.
Storage Device power-fail safety testing
Storage fail-safety testing offers validation of the storage devices power fail-safety and showcases the behavior of the storage devices in uncontrolled power loss situations. Storage testing uses in-house tooling, that simulates power shutdown scenarios over multiple days to validate the devices' behavior and whether the device will store the information as the data was written. Storage test can be performed on different stages of device lifetime and it can be run together with the lifetime testing.
We can compare different flash memory and interface types and compare their reliability. The test suite can be configured to write in sequential or random patterns. Storage testing will provide information on how selected devices handle uncontrolled power-loss e.g. while some devices are capable of handling the power interruption, other models can reorder writes on controller level or even corrupt the data and render the device useless.
Comparative testing
Comparative testing of flash devices can be used to showcase differences between vendor offerings and between different flash interfaces. We use flash vendor specific information to collect a wide variety of information and track the lifetime on the devices. The testing gives perspective on the flash devices' behavior in real use case, lifetime estimate and performance implications over the full lifecycle of the device. Lifetime testing takes time, which depends on the workload, device capacity and the performance of the device over the whole lifetime. The duration of testing will need to be estimated case by case.
Data retention testing
In this service we test how long data is stored without refreshing the cell in end of life conditions or in any other stage of device lifetime, referred as data retention. While usually flash devices have high data retention in the beginning of their life, it can decrease significantly once over half of the device lifetime has been used.
In the data retention testing, the devices can be aged using lifetime testing workload or separately with our high-speed aging workload. We are using standardized methods for accelerating the data retention testing using a thermal chamber.
