[Mannaggia l'America]

Almost sounds like they are using the MSDOS FAT filesystem, which has a limit of 512 files in the root directory.

Memory cards like those found in digital cameras use FAT. (Which is probably why Microsoft recently decided to assert it's patent on FAT - it seemed odd because DOS is obsolete, but the FAT filesystem is used in lots of places.)

[Post Toasties]

I wonder how much of NASA's other hardware is constrained by this type of OS limitation? Also, why couldn't the number of files storable on a given memory be a SW configurable parameter upon reset? Then, if it turns out to be an inappropriate size, simply change that parameter rather than have to rewrite and revalidated the whole OS, which is vastly more time consuming.

[N3WBI3]

In most systems there is a limint in the number of files (in a given Linux box it is the number of inodes assigend to a partitions, NTFS has a fixed limit of 4,294,967,295 files.

[brownsfan]

it seemed odd because DOS is obsolete, but the FAT filesystem is used in lots of places

Not so odd. FAT is well known, and readily available. In a situation like a digital camera, (or a rover?) it is reliable enough. Modern filesystems expand performance, and security. FAT is fine for small applications.

[DMCA]

I have several CF cards that do not use FAT, they use various other flash tuned file systems. Since these probes run VxWorks the flash more than likely has a file system on it that spread out the writes to ensure that no one section of the flash is written to more that the others. This makes that flash last longer.