Moto X (second generation): No F2FS

[Ry]

FYI

Ars says no F2FS, but it outperforms Moto X 2013 anyway

Review: In its second generation, the Moto X becomes a true flagship | Ars Technica

The old Moto X and both Moto Gs post pretty solid storage numbers because their data partitions use a special "Flash Friendly Filesystem" (F2FS) instead of the standard ext4. The new Moto X ditches F2FS, but it doesn't appear to suffer any adverse effects—indeed, its sequential read speed is crazily high, and all of its other stats exceed the numbers posted by last year's model.

 

[thomase00]

I wonder how they managed to get such a high score on sequential reads? The benchmark seems suspicious.

Also, I thought that f2fs was singularly responsibly for the high random write performance on the previous gen. How can they possibly be faster now with ext4?

In general , these scores are much better than other Snapdragon 801 phones which presumably also use ext4.

Perhaps this has something to do with eMMC 5.0 support and/or Motorola's NAND selection...

 

[thomase00]

Actually I wouldn't be surprised if it is using a high-end emmc 5.0 solution.

Look for Anandtech's review of Sandisk's new emmc which has much faster random IO performance.

With the emmc controller optimized to hide the latency of cleanup operations which are more frequent with ext4, maybe f2fs isn't as big of a win (f2fs some disadvantages/tradeoffs after all).

It would also explain the doubling of sequential read performance.

Finally, it would explain why Moto G still uses f2fs: cheaper and lower performance emmc. Remember, snapdragon 400 doesn't support emmc 5.0.

I'm looking forward to the teardown...

Sent from my XT1060 using Tapatalk

 

[Ry]

AnandTech | The New Motorola Moto X (2nd Gen) Review

While the new Moto X doesn't quite top the previous Moto X in random write speeds, it's unlikely that the storage solution is worse. I found that the data and system partitions now use ext4, which means that the performance gains we saw with f2fs are gone. I'm not sure why Motorola decided to change back to ext4 given the performance gains that come with f2fs, but possible reasons include unforeseen conditions where f2fs could result in data loss compared to ext4 or difficulties in integrating f2fs support on Android. At any rate, the new Moto X is one of the best performers in this category, which should keep performance high after a year or two of use.