Mass memory: a balancing act that Nokia can learn from?

This would certainly explain the atrocious speeds of the mass memory in an N95 8GB!

Couldn't agree more. I really do feel my X6 photos storing speed and music player is at the almost unacceptable pace, compared to my friend's 5800. Heck, my unit even have the disk error problem similar to 5800, and has been sent to Care Centre for a motherboard change, thus I would think besides they slow them down, the chip wasn't an expensive chip either. I feel this phone have a lot of potential being a cap screen phone, but current version of Symbian spoiled it. And I don't particularly understand why the OS in N97 cannot be used in X6. All in all, disappointed.

This is not a surprise to anyone involved with Nokia devices, they internal memory chips are slow as hell and the SD cards they provide with low-cost devices are crap too.

Of course this is done for economical reasons , faster chips cost more, fast and reliable chips cost even more.
In order to provide adequate performance for OS and core apps Nokia uses main memory - a separate partition which lives on more faster chip.

Read/Write speed does matter-at least for for high-performance apps (like heavy games and Skype). Installation to main memory is usually the only way to get the most out of it . Installing to different location may have strange results on app.

And there are no excuses to it - maintenance costs and "making it slower so it lives longer and does not break"

P.S.
Obligatory Nokia bashing: Iphone has 1 storage space, so does Android. They managed to solve this problem. why Nokia can't ?
Suggested answer: Keeping the profit margin with huge amount of middle-low class devices released results in usage of cheap sub-par components.

Anecdotal evidence from myself: My 5800 was acting up badly, crashing almost every day.

I tried to backup my device to do a reset, but some files could not be read. So I figured the problem might be a defective SD card, went on Amazon and bought a new 8 GB card for �10 or so.

Lo and behold, it fixed literally every problem I had with my device.

Moral of the story: memory card quality not only affects storage, has an effect on device stability.

Interestingly, this is a problem Samsung also had / have with the i8910. The internal 8 or 16GB memory is *much* slower than using a reasonable memory card.

This seems like a good place to vent my frustration with my N86. It is SLOOOOOOW! Slower than my N95 classic. I was hoping for the opposite when I bought it.

I install everything to mass memory and use my 32Gb microSD mainly for media. Waking up from idle (not powersave) takes about 5 secs and is the most conspicuous example. (FW v21 and still can't upgrade.)

Since this bothers me each and every day, I'd gladly pay the extra cost of faster (and stable) hardware. Money paid for something one is happy with is not an issue. Something that is a daily annoyance is simply not worth saving a few pounds (or is it pennies?) on.

But what a great phone this is, otherwise! 😊

Looking interested to the N8. Please, Nokia, DO NOT make it SLOW!

Thanks for providing space for my grumpy hiccups...

I'm not sure whether this is still an issue, but there used to be major issues with Symbian's implementation of the FAT filesystem, in that it didn't scale very well at all. The more files you had, the slower it got.

My memory is fairly vague, and I can't remember whether the problem was with the total number of files on disk or the number of files in a folder (I think it's the latter).

But that could possibly be another explanation; you have more files on the 32GB disk.

It might be worth making sure all your music is organised into sub-folders, or doing some tests when both devices are empty.

It also shouldn't be too hard to knock together some sort of simple performance benchmark, generating some random data and writing/reading it to/from disk with some timing output.

I find this to be a common problem with flash storage. When I upgraded my 4gb C6 microsdhc to an 8gb C6 there was a considerable difference in access speeds from my phone. The same thing again when I went to 16gb C6. Noticeably slower than the 8gb. Darla Mack did a write up a while back about the disparity between speed and capacity with disks of the same class rating.

ahah, make it slow to make it work longer. Very clever. It's so slow that you use it less, so it works longer.. Very simple...

I think at least some of the speed issue in the music player is software-related, not hardware-related. I say this because I recently upgraded my trusty 5800 to the latest v50 firmware which I think is similar to the current X6 firmware. The music player is noticably slower than it was with the v40 firmware. For example, going into Playlists now takes several seconds - enough to be irritating - whereas before it was around one second. I am guessing that the OS is now reading all the playlists into a memory buffer so that it can implement kinetic scrolling. All the playlists have to be immediately available in memory for fast scrolling. Before kinetic scrolling, the OS could read the playlists a screenful at a time as the user tapped the screen. Just a hunch, maybe wrong.

Best regards,
Malcolm
www.freepoc.org

Access times very much depend on the allocation unit size. Usually, after device's hard reset or standard win\mac format procedure the size is 16kb of 1 unit. Which allows to use a storage more efficiently, but very slow access times. Using conditioned format - the size of allocation unit is 4096 or even 8192 - improves access times twice the original speed. This worked for me on WM devices as well.

I shall just say that the folks at Nokia are bastards.

That, or those at Maemo are smug asshats.

The N900 can consistently attain 16mb/s constant write, why the fuck are they giving us subpar products?

The reason they are giving you subpar products is that they have to save every penny they can because their profit margins are so thin.

When a company (like Nokia, or Dell) decides to compete mainly on price they have to accept a low margin per product and hope to make their overall profit target by shipping high volumes of product.

Typically, after some months or years of doing this the company comes under pressure from shareholders to increase its profit margin. How can it do this? The only ways are to generate higher margin revenue on different products (Nokia's attempt to do this with Ovi has failed to the point where these products have had to be repositioned as free value adds), increase the average selling price per unit sold, or decrease the cost per unit.

Nokia is not in a position to increase its selling price. It has only managed to hold its marketshare by greatly <<reducing>> its selling price over the last three years and, particularly after the N97 debacle, it doesn't have enough mind-share left to be able to bring out new products at top-of-market prices (hence the low announced price of the N8).

The only way Nokia has left to make money is to reduce its cost of manufacturing and servicing the products it sells.

All we consumers who like Symbian and don't want to see it die can hope is that Nokia is prepared to take a hit on profit generated by the N8 in order to rebuild the company's consumer mindshare. Otherwise, if the N8 under performs we are likely to see a long slow decline of Symbian into an exclusively low end platform or even its complete disappearance from an over crowded mobile OS market

This is another example of bloggers and commenters having no idea what they're talking about.

If you're planning to run factories and make millions of devices you can only buy parts available in sufficient guaranteed quantities. To do otherwise means you are likely to have problems getting hold of parts for production. We've all seen devices over the years where some component or other becomes unavailable leading to delays while alternatives are sourced. No manufacturer will tell you about this, but it happens in lots of cases.

Further, as memory parts are being built on smaller processes they are becoming slower and less reliable. It's unavoidable if NAND technology continues to be used and is a physical attribute of the smaller process size. The underlying switching does become faster, and smaller amounts of charge are required but at the same time larger storage size comes with increased block sizes. You can only write to 'erased' NAND and the larger the addressable block is, the more likely that you will need to erase something in order to write. Similarly, since smaller processes result in higher leakage, you need to move data around more often when reading it to ensure that the contents are not lost.

You can't even just buy the older parts because they're no longer being manufactured in sufficient quantities to base a product line on.

Mass memories are also not necessarily designed to have the performance attributes you would wish to see on a phone - typically manufacturers concentrate on improving large sequential read/write performance (as this is highly valued in benchmarks).

My point is that there are a million reasons why some parts perform better than others and cost is at most a very small part of it.

In another thread somebody pointed out the term "eco-system" as being a meaningless idiot word.

I would like to add another: "mindshare".

Always hated Nokia for not giving s60 the proper hardware. And when other companies provide good hardware(Satio, Vivaz, i8910) some software disadvantage is there.
Nokia should provide Symbian users with decent hardware, hope the N8 gives us a decent or deserving experience. It's been a long long wait (since N95 days) that we were able to hold some Nokia symbian hardware with pride.

Unregistered wrote:
" This is another example of bloggers and commenters having no idea what they're talking about.

If you're planning to run factories and make millions of devices you can only buy parts available in sufficient guaranteed quantities. To do otherwise means you are likely to have problems getting hold of parts for production. We've all seen devices over the years where some component or other becomes unavailable leading to delays while alternatives are sourced. No manufacturer will tell you about this, but it happens in lots of cases.

Further, as memory parts are being built on smaller processes they are becoming slower and less reliable. It's unavoidable if NAND technology continues to be used and is a physical attribute of the smaller process size. The underlying switching does become faster, and smaller amounts of charge are required but at the same time larger storage size comes with increased block sizes. You can only write to 'erased' NAND and the larger the addressable block is, the more likely that you will need to erase something in order to write. Similarly, since smaller processes result in higher leakage, you need to move data around more often when reading it to ensure that the contents are not lost.

You can't even just buy the older parts because they're no longer being manufactured in sufficient quantities to base a product line on.

Mass memories are also not necessarily designed to have the performance attributes you would wish to see on a phone - typically manufacturers concentrate on improving large sequential read/write performance (as this is highly valued in benchmarks).

My point is that there are a million reasons why some parts perform better than others and cost is at most a very small part of it."

So perhaps you would like to venture an opinion on why Nokia's phones have consistently under performed in comparison to those from other manufacturers?

I give you every touch screen phone released by Nokia to date. All have been pretty much universally reviewed as having insufficient RAM and processors that are too slow. Are you saying that 256mb ram chips and faster processors are not available in sufficient quantities?

Of course Nokia could have retooled to include these higher specs but they chose not to. Do you really think that cost and profit margin are not major factors in these types of decisions?

Returning to the mass memory example, I hate to bring the A word into this but I've never heard of anyone complaining about the transfer speed of an iPhone or iPod Touch and they have sold 70M of those so far. Do you not think they have a sustainable supply of flash memory chips that operate at the desired speed? Of course they do. The difference is that they probably pay a little more for them (and the difference is probably a few pence per chip) because they can afford to pay more because their profit margin is so high on these devices.

By the way, I never said that margin was the <<only>> factor that drives these decisions but it certainly is a <<major>> factor. If you can't see that then I'm afraid you are the one that doesn't know what you are talking about.

Unregistered wrote:In another thread somebody pointed out the term "eco-system" as being a meaningless idiot word.

I would like to add another: "mindshare".

if you think either "eco-system" or "mindshare" has no meaning as a word you should consider investing in a dictionary.

xerxes wrote:if you think either "eco-system" or "mindshare" has no meaning as a word you should consider investing in a dictionary.

No need to invest when they are free on the internet:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=wank%20word

"In the UK and the Commonwealth, a strongly derogatory and deliberately vulgar term for a buzzword, signifying that it is worthless and meaningless jargon. Wank words may be short phrases as well as single words. The word is most often used of corporate, official, or academic language. "

I give you every touch screen phone released by Nokia to date. All have been pretty much universally reviewed as having insufficient RAM and processors that are too slow. Are you saying that 256mb ram chips and faster processors are not available in sufficient quantities?

Of course Nokia could have retooled to include these higher specs but they chose not to. Do you really think that cost and profit margin are not major factors in these types of decisions?

I wasn't saying anything about processors, I don't know much about the nitty gritty details. For whatever reason Nokia has a set of HW platforms and we see what they are in the released products. Neither you or I know what would be required to change that chipset selection.

Perhaps the numbers just don't work out? Maybe they don't believe they could increase the price to cover whatever the extra cost would be? Maybe there's a technical issue preventing more memory or faster clock speeds?

If it were as easy to get up to speed as all of us enthusiasts seem to think, then why have they not done it? There simply has to be more to it.

Returning to the mass memory example, I hate to bring the A word into this but I've never heard of anyone complaining about the transfer speed of an iPhone or iPod Touch and they have sold 70M of those so far. Do you not think they have a sustainable supply of flash memory chips that operate at the desired speed? Of course they do. The difference is that they probably pay a little more for them (and the difference is probably a few pence per chip) because they can afford to pay more because their profit margin is so high on these devices.

iPhone and iPod flash is rumoured to be raw NAND managed by the host CPU. This is not the same at all as using embedded MMC devices or SD cards. They also don't have to use FAT filesystems to allow USB Mass Storage to work. Equally, the N900 doesn't use FAT, I think it's one of the ext family. It might still have a FAT partition though, I've not used one.

The raw NAND used in both MMC and iPhone products is pretty much the same and although it's raw performance at the root of the issue, it's not the entire story. In terms of what speed you see as an end user, the stack of variables is NAND -> controller -> filesystem -> application.

Buying raw NAND is probably even cheaper than buying MMCs because it won't have a bit of SDRAM and a controller in there, but writing good software to control it is hard and most companies don't have the expertise. You typically need years of battle-hardened development to have sufficiently reliable controller SW. Perhaps Apple have bought some SW from Samsung, or maybe licensed it.

Back to iPod - it's also the case that there isn't that much stuff written on the device, largely data is shovelled on and off during an iTunes sync. Older iPods aren't usable while Syncing. I expect that a fairly large amount of memory is used while syncing to ensure that writes to the NAND can be matched as well as possible to the underlying structure. I suspect that one of the reasons that you can't remove tracks on the device is that it only has read access to the databases - the master copies are held in iTunes on the PC. This all points to a design where the filesystem requirements can be controlled ahead of time and restricts the necessary functionality envelope very nicely. Suddenly what looks like a pain in the ass (requiring iTunes to get stuff on and off) allows the developers to concentrate on excelling at a few things resulting in a nice product. Apple all over!

You can't do any of that on a device which supports USB mass storage.

Actually, for an iPod the picture is even more rosy. Since you are captive to a power source during a sync, you can afford to buffer data in RAM while it dribbles out to the flash. Large writes such as music tracks or movies can go straight to flash while metadata updates can be performed all in one go at the end. I think they must be doing something like this because of the dire warnings about unplugging without a dismount. If they were using the storage in a reliable mode, then it wouldn't matter if you unplugged it or pulled the battery or whatever. At most you'd lose some of the tracks but the device itself would work fine however it would be a lot slower.

I know that I think my iPod is terribly slow at syncing, and installing apps takes an age. I expected it to be much better, but it's just about the same as everything else. I see no magic yet.

It was very smart of apple not to support mass storage while everyone else did, it has allowed them a huge amount of design flexibility. If you have had it though, would your customers be happy if it were no longer available? Would better performance justify it's loss? How much better would it have to be?
I know people who use mass storage mode on their phone for putting music on despite the fact that if you use MTP then your phone doesn't need to index it all afterwards. Hell, I do it myself sometimes for convenience.

crapple got a good deal on nand by screwing over the flash market.

"This isn�t an article to make excuses and somehow justify Nokia�s decision on the X6 32GB..." you said. But you almost did it, do you know?! I�m very sorry for my rudeness, but I�m too tired of Nokia making so many mistakes (some unthinkably fool) since the all successful N95 (in his time).

andynugent wrote:I'm not sure whether this is still an issue, but there used to be major issues with Symbian's implementation of the FAT filesystem, in that it didn't scale very well at all. The more files you had, the slower it got.

My memory is fairly vague, and I can't remember whether the problem was with the total number of files on disk or the number of files in a folder (I think it's the latter).

But that could possibly be another explanation; you have more files on the 32GB disk.

It's not Symbian's implementation, but a limitation with FAT32 in general, which is one of the reasons why Microsoft doesn't allow formatting of volumes over 32Gb with their own tools (because the performance is waaaay too slow when you have a lot of files). This is one of the reasons why Microsoft introduced exFAT.

Unregistered wrote:No need to invest when they are free on the internet:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=wank%20word

"In the UK and the Commonwealth, a strongly derogatory and deliberately vulgar term for a buzzword, signifying that it is worthless and meaningless jargon. Wank words may be short phrases as well as single words. The word is most often used of corporate, official, or academic language. "

He's talking about a proper dictionary, not one that has any old person contributing to it.