Timeline for Does unused flash memory degrade faster?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
15 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Nov 14 at 2:21 | comment | added | Austin Hemmelgarn | @user1850479 The cells won’t degrade over time if unused, but charge leakage will still occur eventually (it’s a matter of when, not if), even if data has only ever been written exactly once and never again. | |
| Nov 12 at 23:43 | comment | added | gnasher729 | Hearth, more likely is that the super cheap ones have been tested and failed. The ones that didn't fail are sold for more money. | |
| Nov 12 at 21:27 | history | became hot network question | |||
| Nov 12 at 15:45 | comment | added | Justme | Also you don't know what the Flash controller on the pendrive does, or doesn't do. It may scrub the contents, making reads in the background to verify the contents is OK without too many errors to be corrected with ECC. Your computer has no control other than it sees blocks of something called mass media. For example, there is a thing called "read disturb" which means after wearing out a flash cell just by reading it enough times it must be refreshed or moved someplace else so the old place can be later erased and rewritten with new data. All this wear leveling happens and it may break. | |
| Nov 12 at 15:25 | answer | added | Aaron | timeline score: 20 | |
| Nov 12 at 15:08 | comment | added | Marcus Müller | @MisterSmith usually they have to, because a significant amount of the physical pages are going to be damaged and have to be excluded from being used as storage. But that's usually just a firmware function that has to run on factory initialization, once. Afterwards, you know how many of the say 1 Gb of storage you can actually sell, including "write reserve" to help reduce avg. write wear per cell. The lower you declare your storage space, the more reserve, the more robust your product. You can of course declare broken cells as working. You know, to maximize profit regardless of satisfaction. | |
| Nov 12 at 14:53 | answer | added | Marcus Müller | timeline score: 17 | |
| Nov 12 at 14:23 | comment | added | Hearth | @MisterSmith The super-cheap ones don't. | |
| Nov 12 at 14:05 | comment | added | Mister Smith | @user1850479 "Probably the flash was always bad": Don't manufacturers quality-check their pendrives before selling them? | |
| Nov 12 at 14:00 | comment | added | Justme | @MisterSmith Formatting does not mean anything. It does not write anything else except the filesystem headers to indicate there are no files. Also getting fake USB sticks from unreputable sellers is a problem. The USB firmware may say they are 4GB and they might not have 4GB of flash. An address pin or second chip with half of the memory may have bad soldering or damaged. | |
| Nov 12 at 13:48 | comment | added | Ste Kulov | @MisterSmith OK, cool. Thought it was worth mentioning just in case. | |
| Nov 12 at 13:44 | comment | added | Mister Smith | @SteKulov If I remember correctly I did format the old one a few times and the size didn't change. The newer one was formatted at least once after buying it. | |
| Nov 12 at 13:37 | comment | added | Ste Kulov | One point to mention just to make sure there's no conflation of the problem. At least with the no-name brand, it's common for them to (and I don't know how they do this) fake the true size of the drive reported by your OS so they can get away with selling a larger drive. Then when your OS tries to go beyond the actual size, you get errors. If you manually re-format the drive, it should report the correct size afterwards. Might be worth trying this first just in case it's conflating the issue here. | |
| Nov 12 at 13:37 | comment | added | user1850479 | Probably the flash was always bad and you didn't notice until the controller had to start allocating or reallocating blocks with the huge file write. Unused NAND should not age of unpowered and blank as far as I know. | |
| Nov 12 at 13:26 | history | asked | Mister Smith | CC BY-SA 4.0 |