Solid File System™ (SolFS) Driver Edition SDK
Solid File System (SolFS) is a flexible, high-performance file system, designed for use with both real media (such as Hard Drives or Flash Card) and virtual media (files on the disk, databases, application resources, raw memory).
Driver Edition SDK lets you create a virtual disk from your Windows or Windows Mobile application.
Driver Edition SDK consists of the system-level drivers and user-mode API.
Drivers
The drivers are virtual disk driver and file system driver.
Virtual disk driver creates a virtual storage device, which emulates a physical storage.
File System Driver maps SolFS file system to the virtual storage device.
The drivers work on system level (kernel-mode on Windows and a system DLL on Windows Mobile) and turn SolFS storage into a "real" disk device with it's own file system.
The "real disk device" is accessible in read-only and/or read-write mode by any application which uses system file management API.
The drivers offer certain features, specific to it's functionality. For example, you can make the mounted disk visible to the user or hide it from the user. You can grant access to your storage to only selected applications, thus providing additional level of data security.
SolFS drivers can use either a file on existing file system or a partition on the disk as a backend media for storing information.
In other words, you can format a media (partition on the disk, a flash card) as a SolFS disk.
Or you can just create a file which will hold the data.
The drivers also support callback mechanism, which lets you keep your data storage wherever you want (i.e. on remote computer, in memory or database record etc.).
The unique feature of SolFS is it's resizable nature. When SolFS storage is mapped to a file (or other resizable media), SolFS virtual storage uses only the amount of space, that is needed to keep the data. So, instead of allocating a several-gigabyte-large storage (to ensure that it will be enough for holding all the data you have), you allocate a small file which is just several kilobytes large. And the storage file will be resized when necessary. If you remove the files from the storage, the storage is shrinked automatically.
User-mode API
User-mode API is very similar to the one of Standard Edition of SolFS, and introduces just about ten new functions, specific to driver management and storage mounting operations.
The API is needed only for driver and storage manipulation. All file operations can be performed using system file management API or framework-specific classes.
For example, you mount the storage using API functions, then write file using FileStream class in .NET or TFileStream in Delphi or CreateFile() API when working with WinAPI.
For compatibility with Standard Edition, driver edition API also provides SolFSStream class, which can be used to access the data on the device.
User-mode API is provided as a .NET assembly for .NET development, as a set of classes for use in C++ or Delphi and also as a DLL for calling it from other Windows applications.
Supported platforms
Driver edition is currently available for the following platforms:- Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003 Server and Windows Vista. Both 32-bit and 64-bit (AMD64) systems are supported.
- Windows CE 3.0 (PocketPC 2002), Windows CE 4.2 including Windows Mobile 2003, Windows CE 5.0 including Windows Mobile 5 (PocketPC and Smartphone editions) and Windows Mobile 6 and any other Windows CE-based platforms that have storage APIs
To request more details please use our feedback form or Web-based Helpdesk system.