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cRIO corrupting USB drives

Hey guys.

 

Prior to LabVIEW RT 2012, we were using the OS vendor's built-in USB stack.  It's possible some of your problems may be solved via an upgrade of the USB subsystem we did in LabVIEW RT to 2012 or better.  That might at least solve your plug/replug problem, we've seen a number of odd issues magically fixed when we upgraded to a new USB stack in LabVIEW RT 2012.  But, I wouldn't hold my breath when it comes to the stability of large USB Flash Drives.  

 

FAT32 is absolutely abhorrent on large partitions, that's why Windows doesn't even let you format a hard disk as FAT32 any more (only NTFS).  The stability cutoff point is about 32GB - as you approach 32GB the stability of the metadata of the FAT32 partition drops almost exponentially.  Power Outages make the problem geometrically worse.  A 64GB FAT32 USB FLASH drive on a system that experiences frequent/constant power outages has about as much chance as a mobile home in a Texas tornado - which is about none whatsoever.

 

On our internal FLASH for the cRIO product line, and on our PXI systems (optional) we use the Reliance file system, which is a lot more tolerant - generally you still run the risk of losing data in a power outage, but your risk of corrupting the metadata of your filesystem is virtually zero.  Unfortunately we don't natively support Reliance partitions on a USB Flash Drive medium, and you cannot read a Reliance partition on Windows without special drivers.  

 

I don't know of a good solution to this problem if local storage is a must-have for you.  

 

-Danny

Message 11 of 16
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At this point, I would like to point everyone interested over to the Idea exchange for this idea: Allow USB hard-drive or stick to be formated with Reliance NITRO instead of FAT over on the LabVIEW realtime idea exchange.

 

I got a pitiful number of votes, so any upvotes you can help generate would be nice.

 

Please note that what we would ask for is su[pport for USB/external storage formated with Reliance NITRO, the latest version of their file system, as the one in use on the cRIO's currently have so many flaws and performance issues that it would not help most any realistic application on a large external storage media.. Which is also why the original Reliance file system has not been supported for many many years.

 

Thanks!

 

 

QFang
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CLD LabVIEW 7.1 to 2016
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Message 12 of 16
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That brings up a good point - even if you COULD use the currently-supported Reliance on a USB Flash Drive, the current version of Reliance cannot handle above a 2GB partition.  Smiley Frustrated

 

Wouldn't it be AWESOME to have a cRIO platform where you could pretty much install whatever file system you wanted?  Smiley Wink

 

-Danny

 

PS:  NI-Week 2013 is going to be AWESOME.  Are you ready?

 

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Message 13 of 16
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I'll be at NI week, for our use case, I think the new awesome may fail to hit our target price level, as new products rarely come out in the low-end price range, but regardless NI Week is ALWAYS awesome.. Please consider up-voting supporting newer version(s) of the Reliance file system. 😉

 

Thanks!

Kjell

QFang
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CLD LabVIEW 7.1 to 2016
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Message 14 of 16
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I have also run into issues with drive corruption on both 9024 and 9068 controllers when using 32 MB FAT 32 data drives.  Generally the data on the drive has become corrupted (possibly due to a power cycle) and CompactRIO is no longer able to mount or discover the USB drive.  Without any utilities for disk management it makes if difficult to rely on the USB interface for long term critical data logging.  

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Message 15 of 16
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Hello,

 

If you're actively seeing issues with data corruption, feel free to make a new top-level post to this forum with more details (ex: LVRT version being used, cRIO software version). I agree that long term critical data logging is important for many cRIO use-cases.

Software Engineer
National Instruments
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Message 16 of 16
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