Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

Anyone know anything about the bitrot characteristics of flash memory? Or where I can find out such information?


Categories: Memories.

/ 5 Comments

5 comments

  1. venta

    I keep reading that as “Poirot charactersitics”. Like, you know, whether your flash memory has a prim moustache and an annoyingly smug demeanour.

    Reply
  2. pjc50

    Manufacturer’s spec sheets, via Maplin or RS? Do you want flash in general or a specific device?

    IIRC you get about 10,000 writes before bits start becoming stuck at 1.

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    • neilh

      I’m more concerned about the longevity of data once written, I’m testing for behaviour under file corruption conditions so I figured it would be good to test for the kinds of things that will happen to data once flash starts rotting….seems like all the rot will happen in one direction, either ones or zeros depending on the configuration used, which is a good place to start.

      Reply
  3. maluse

    If you’re designing something that uses flash and are worried about bit-rot you may want to have a look at FRAM (ferroelectric) devices instead. Their capacities are much lower than flash at the moment but they’ve got pretty much unlimited write capacity (and you don’t have to write a page at a time either). I’m using one in some hardware I’ve designed and it seems nice so far.

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    • neilh

      Testing software to make sure it can deal with generic flash decay, though I suspect the software itself will have started to rot at about the same time so its probably not that important…

      Reply

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