c03rad0r on Nostr: Flash memory cells don't keep working forever. The more times each cell is written ...
Flash memory cells don't keep working forever. The more times each cell is written to, the more it degrades. Wikipedia states that typical memory sticks are only designed to have each cell written to a few thousand times before the degradation causes data corruption.
Most devices use a technique called "wear levelling" that attempts to spread writes around the memory. That means you're not constantly hammering the same cells and causing them to fail when the rest of the memory is still fresh. Because of wear levelling, a USB flash drive should last until the amount of data that has been written to it is approximately a few thousand times its capacity. For example, a gigabyte drive should be able to cope with a few terabytes of data being written to it, over its lifetime.
I'm not sure what you mean by "full erasing" but I guess it means either overwriting all the data on the card or overwriting the entire card. That has just the same effect as writing the same amount of data, in terms of memory wear. So, for example, writing a megabyte of data and then overwriting it all should have roughly the same effect, in the long term, as just writing two megabytes of data. Reformatting the flash drive should have roughly the same effect as completely filling the card with data.
So, long story short, if every time you write data to the drive, you eventually delete it by overwriting, that should roughly halve the life of the drive (as compared to a standard operating system delete, which just marks the areas of the card as unused, without overwriting the data stored there). Maybe you care about that; maybe you don't. It would have been good for a few thousand uses; now you can "only" use it a couple of thousand times.
If you delete by reformatting, the drive will wear faster: if you fill the drive to x-percent, then reformat, you're writing as much data as you would if you filled it to (100+x)-percent. If you just deleted the data, you'd be able to use the drive a few thousand times 100/x times; reformatting means you only get to use it a few thousand times 100/(100+x) times. The life of the card is reduced by a factor of (100+x)/x. For example, by a factor of three if you only half-filled it, and by a factor of 11 if you were only 10%-filling it.
https://superuser.com/a/948220Published at
2025-03-27 23:01:49Event JSON
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"content": "\n\nFlash memory cells don't keep working forever. The more times each cell is written to, the more it degrades. Wikipedia states that typical memory sticks are only designed to have each cell written to a few thousand times before the degradation causes data corruption.\n\nMost devices use a technique called \"wear levelling\" that attempts to spread writes around the memory. That means you're not constantly hammering the same cells and causing them to fail when the rest of the memory is still fresh. Because of wear levelling, a USB flash drive should last until the amount of data that has been written to it is approximately a few thousand times its capacity. For example, a gigabyte drive should be able to cope with a few terabytes of data being written to it, over its lifetime.\n\nI'm not sure what you mean by \"full erasing\" but I guess it means either overwriting all the data on the card or overwriting the entire card. That has just the same effect as writing the same amount of data, in terms of memory wear. So, for example, writing a megabyte of data and then overwriting it all should have roughly the same effect, in the long term, as just writing two megabytes of data. Reformatting the flash drive should have roughly the same effect as completely filling the card with data.\n\nSo, long story short, if every time you write data to the drive, you eventually delete it by overwriting, that should roughly halve the life of the drive (as compared to a standard operating system delete, which just marks the areas of the card as unused, without overwriting the data stored there). Maybe you care about that; maybe you don't. It would have been good for a few thousand uses; now you can \"only\" use it a couple of thousand times.\n\nIf you delete by reformatting, the drive will wear faster: if you fill the drive to x-percent, then reformat, you're writing as much data as you would if you filled it to (100+x)-percent. If you just deleted the data, you'd be able to use the drive a few thousand times 100/x times; reformatting means you only get to use it a few thousand times 100/(100+x) times. The life of the card is reduced by a factor of (100+x)/x. For example, by a factor of three if you only half-filled it, and by a factor of 11 if you were only 10%-filling it.\n\nhttps://superuser.com/a/948220",
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