Quote:
Originally Posted by kmartburrito
Haha, you should talk to No2Chem and IMCokeman...there IS a theoretical limit to how many times the ROM will allow writes to it, but it's up in the thousands of times, so I doubt you'll hit it
who knows though, I seem to flash 6 or 7 times a week lately  |
Courtesy of wikipedia.
Memory wear
Another limitation is that flash memory has a finite number of erase-write cycles. Most commercially available flash products are guaranteed to withstand around
100,000 write-erase-cycles, before the wear begins to deteriorate the integrity of the storage.[
citation needed] The guaranteed cycle count may apply only to block zero (as is the case with
TSOP NAND parts), or to all blocks (as in NOR). This effect is partially offset in some chip firmware or file system drivers by counting the writes and dynamically remapping blocks in order to spread write operations between sectors; this technique is called
wear levelling. Another approach is to perform write verification and remapping to spare sectors in case of write failure, a technique called bad block management (BBM). For portable consumer devices, these wearout management techniques typically extend the life of the flash memory beyond the life of the device itself, and some data loss may be acceptable in these applications. For high reliability data storage, however, it is not advisable to use flash memory that has been through a large number of programming cycles. This limitation does not apply to 'read-only' applications such as
thin clients and
routers, which are only programmed once or at most a few times during their lifetime.