Recently I have gotten myself in to buying USB flash drives in order to back up some of my data, however once I got into the detailed specs of the consumer flash drives I have gotten worried, about the quality of the NAND flash chips inside them. The most recent flash drive I bought is a 32GB 3.0 USB with Micron TLC chips. Now I know that these chips have about 1,000 program/erase cycles, but the problem is that I can’t find any real explanation what it takes for one of these cycles to happen. Basically, this is the question:
If I copy a 1KB txt file to the 32GB flash drive and then erase it does that use one P/E cycle, or do I have to actually write over time 32GB of data to the drive and erase it over time, for one of these cycles to be completed? Also does formatting the drive destroy some of its cycles?
Sincerely,
Neil