Studies of file access patterns in embedded systems
There is a good paper titled "The Case for Efﬁcient File Access Pattern Modeling" by Thomas M. Kroeger and Darrell D. E. Long. It reviews two classic model for file access pattern "The ﬁrst model is based on a graph, that keeps frequency counts for all ﬁles accessed within a window following an access to each ﬁle. The second model was adapted from the text compression technique ﬁnite multi-order context modeling (FMOC), to track ﬁle access patterns. It uses a tree to keep frequency counts of access patterns, tracking a ﬁnite number of multiple-order patterns." 

I think these techniques could be applied for different small scale file systems such as hard disk, flash memory, etc on pc or embeded systems.

This paper "Analysis of Disk Access Patterns on File Systems for Content Addressable Storage" written by Kuniyasu Suzaki, Kengo Iijima, Toshiki Yagi, and Cyrille Artho is also very useful, while the OS of many embedded systems are Linux-based.