Most Nexus 7 2012 owners have experienced issues with their device turning slow

Mar 15, 2014 08:25 GMT  ·  By

As you might as well know, the Nexus 7 2012 tablet offers less than ideal flash memory performance, so if you're the owner of one such device, you might be familiar with the issue.

Back when it first came out, reviews of the device praised it for its high level of performance and speed. But, as time went by, most users seemed to notice a sensible I/ O performance decline. This led to an overall sluggishness in using the device that transformed the once fast tablet into a slow, decrepit one.

With the advent of Android 4.3, the problem was somehow kept under control due to the use of TRIM. This new improvement allowed Google’s OS to instruct the flash storage controller when to collect / recycle unused data pages / blocks.

The result was that devices running Android 4.3 were no longer becoming sluggish in time, maintaining the same increased level of performance.

But there’s another way to go about this. Senior Member on the xda-developer forum, legolas93 wanted to tackle the task of improving the original Nexus 7’s storage performance through the use of F2FS.

This entails the creation of a different file system designed to be more optimized to the characteristics of NAND memory in flash devices.

But before moving on and providing you with more details, we should warn you that changing your file system means you’ll be losing all your data. So if you want to go ahead and try to improve your aging Nexus’ storage, be sure to make a full back-up and then transfer the back-up you have made to your computer, while you perform the necessary steps.

To get things started on the right track, you’ll have to download the F2FS-enabled kernel and a modified TWRP, which will be reformatting the tablet with F2FS.

The next stage is to flash the downloaded kernel through your current custom recovery and the modified version of TWRP through fastboot.

Moving on, you then have to access the modified TWRP and format to the new file system. Last but not least, you can now restore your back-up after copying it back on the Nexus from your PC.

For more details about the procedure, head on to the xda-developers forum and check out the full thread. Moreover, note that if you’re a SlimKat user, you may want to go for this particular version that has been modified to be fully compatible with F2FS. Now you can say goodbye to your laggy Nexus 7.