SD Card RL-FlashFS - Power Loss?

Hello All.

We're looking into beginning development on an ARM7 based platform, and we are thinking about using an attached SD-card for storing environmental log data.

I've noted that "All files opened for writing must be closed before the memory card is removed from the socket. Otherwise, a FAT file system might be corrupted." as per the instructions on Keil's website, but my question is:

If a system has not closed files it is writing to on the SD-card using a FAT file system, and a power loss occurs, will/can the file system also be corrupted in such a case? I'm assuming yes?

any thoughts on this? is it a bad idea in general to use a FAT file system in a system that very well could expect power loss at any time?

Thank you.

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  • is it a bad idea in general to use a FAT file system in a system that very well could expect power loss at any time?

    As anyone who has ever used FAT file systems on a regular basis can tell you: yes, it's a bad idea. FAT is widely known to be quite spectacularly bad at surviving spontaneous system shutdowns. DOS and Windows (up to 9x) users have had to run file system checks on a shamefully regular basis because of it. I don't even want to think about what FAT would do to a flash storage medium if that didn't use wear levelling in an abstraction layer between the file system and the raw falsh.

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  • is it a bad idea in general to use a FAT file system in a system that very well could expect power loss at any time?

    As anyone who has ever used FAT file systems on a regular basis can tell you: yes, it's a bad idea. FAT is widely known to be quite spectacularly bad at surviving spontaneous system shutdowns. DOS and Windows (up to 9x) users have had to run file system checks on a shamefully regular basis because of it. I don't even want to think about what FAT would do to a flash storage medium if that didn't use wear levelling in an abstraction layer between the file system and the raw falsh.

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