Steven,

Other than your Window's compatability, I would try to roll my own filesystem. But that is me. The DOS FAT filesystems' FAT (File Allocation Table) is a real bother for the linear nature of MP3 data. The FAT tables can get in the way if you don't have enough space to cache the whole table. Fragmentation can quickly become an issue if files aren't allocated intelligently.

One thing that would be nice for MP3 files is the ability to store extended attributes. Apple's filesystems store attributes nicely by having a dual fork: attribute fork, and the data fork. The attributes fork can store miscelaneous information about the data: in MP3 case, you might store things like: Title, author, encoding scheme, time-base, time, password. You can mimic this type of file by creating a different file with the same name, but different extension. The problem is that there is a chance of the two files getting out of sync with each other. Perhaps less of a problem in an MP3 player.

I'm not familiar with many of the different filesystems, but as mentioned before, Linux is a good source of code for supporting filesystems. There are many filesystems supported under Linux.


Steven F. Boks wrote:
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* Do you need sub-directories?>> YES!
* What max disk size will be used?>> 1-128GB
* Maximum number of files? >> 30K ;)
* What is the common size of a file? >> 5mb (Mp3's ;)
* Do you need long filenames or case sensative filenames?>> Nope
* How much memory do you have for directory caches and allocation tables?>> SRAM 32kbytes, program +/- 6kbytes
* How fast does it need to be--for file creation, appending (writes), reads, opens, and deletes.>> Well, fast enough.
* What do you need to be compatible with?>> Windows, i want to plug it into a usb socket and use it as ext. drive.
* Do you need to partition the disk? >> Dont realy care,, 1 disk is enough.
* Do you need some sort of filesystem fixer such as chkdsk? This is much more complex than the normal filesystem code--and memory intensive. >>No,,, i guess not.

Fat32 is just for compatibility. I guess that linux filesystems are way more logic, but i will only use the 11char filenames,, i dont care much about the longfilenames.