Big SSD in a Tesla - Why multiple partitions?

[tomstephens89]

Howdy all, am using a 2TB SSD with separate exFAT partitions for cameras, music and lightshows as per popular online guides...

However short of trying this myself, why can't we just have a single partition with a folder for each role? The car supports exFAT, it doesn't car about the name of the partition itself, only the folders within....

I see no reason why a single partition wouldn't work. Just wondering if anyone knows?

Worked in IT for 20 years. This stuff always makes me ask WHY.

 

[Tam]

Howdy all, am using a 2TB SSD with separate exFAT partitions for cameras, music and lightshows as per popular online guides...

However short of trying this myself, why can't we just have a single partition with a folder for each role? The car supports exFAT, it doesn't car about the name of the partition itself, only the folders within....

I see no reason why a single partition wouldn't work. Just wondering if anyone knows?

Worked in IT for 20 years. This stuff always makes me ask WHY.

I guess because it diverts resources to do what you mentioned.

It's a matter of priority: what coders must work on first: fart sound or USB drive with only 1 partition needed?

 

[EVRider-FL]

I think it might be a performance issue. Having everything accessing the same drive at the same time might cause problems, especially when most people use a USB drive. I know it’s the same physical drive, but I suspect different partitions minimizes conflicts.

 

[Perscitus]

My take is two partitions give you more flexability. And allow you to have one USB port occupied for one device serving two primary functions, which would otherwise require two devices.

With two partitions, you can easily review/delete all videos and still keep your music and videos intact (just dont format the memory device via the cars GUI as that deletes the partitions).

Now with last year or so of MCU software updates, both can be formatted as GPT exFAT, with one smaller for camera clip recording and another bigger for FLAC, MP3s and HVEC x265 MKVs MP4s etc.

GPT exFAT partitions coupled with a good quality USB cable capable of USB2/3 handshakes and data transfer speeds, and not only creating the well known TeslaCam folder but also calling each partition TESLADRIVE helps to avoid any of the SSD and USB thumb drive corruption and disconnect issues that used to plague us in 2020/2021.

 

[BitJam]

I see no reason why a single partition wouldn't work. Just wondering if anyone knows?

Good question. My guess is they currently unmount the TeslaCam partition when you disable TeslaCam. This makes it safe to remove the device. There is no separate "safe removal" button. Of course, this would interfere with playing music or a light show on that same partition. The light show and music are read-only (and probably mounted as such) so I think it's always safe to remove their devices. But if they shared a partition with TeslaCam, they couldn't be mounted read-only which makes removal without unmounting less safe.

This scheme makes sense for keeping things simple and problem free. They have millions of cars in the fleet. Unlikely edge cases will probably show up for some people. I don't think having separate partitions on the same device provides a significant improvement in I/O performance.

OTOH, I don't know why light shows and music can't share a partition. Or why I can't have more than one light show. It's possible they have a "locked down and compartmentalized" mindset since they need to be very careful to prevent black hats from being able to take control of the cars. When they started working on the light show feature, that group was probably given their own partition so the other groups didn't have to worry about it.