Is "wearing down the flash" really still an issue? Hard drives these days are flash-based - surely the read/write cycles modern flash memory can withstand are high enough to manage a few breakpoints?
Yes. In an embedded environment, its not uncommon to:
1. Have a NOR flash part rated for 10,000 or fewer cycles.
2. Have no facility for remapping bad sectors.
3. Have no wear-leveling mechanism.
All of this is reasonable for a product that will only be flashed once during manufacturing (and there are a lot of those products) or a product that will receive a firmware update a single-digit number of times in its lifetime.
In contrast to an SSD, where:
1. NAND flash is used, with 100,000 to 1,000,000 write cycles
2. The drive can transparently remap bad sectors, so flash can start to fail before anybody notices.
3. The drive performs automatic wear leveling - if you try to write a single sector a million times, the drive will do something closer to writing a million sectors once.
> NAND flash is used, with 100,000 to 1,000,000 write cycles
Damn, where can you get that kind of flash chips with even 100k cycles endurance? I'd like to place a large order. 64 Gbit chip, please.
1000-3000 P/E cycles is typical endurance for MLC NAND flash, not 100-1000k. SLC chips would fare better, but larger ones are too expensive for typical applications.
1. Have a NOR flash part rated for 10,000 or fewer cycles. 2. Have no facility for remapping bad sectors. 3. Have no wear-leveling mechanism.
All of this is reasonable for a product that will only be flashed once during manufacturing (and there are a lot of those products) or a product that will receive a firmware update a single-digit number of times in its lifetime.
In contrast to an SSD, where:
1. NAND flash is used, with 100,000 to 1,000,000 write cycles 2. The drive can transparently remap bad sectors, so flash can start to fail before anybody notices. 3. The drive performs automatic wear leveling - if you try to write a single sector a million times, the drive will do something closer to writing a million sectors once.