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flash memory life

I

iCheese

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 31, 2006
238
3
Flash memory is supposed to have a limited life from what I have read. How long will it take for the memory in an iPhone to die from constant syncing?

I am sure the memory would last longer than the amount of time it would take the average person to upgrade to a new phone, but it would be interesting to actually know around how many years the memory would last.
 
"flash memory has a finite number of erase-write cycles (most commercially available flash products are guaranteed to withstand 100,000 write-erase-cycles for block 0, and no guarantees for other block"

"some industry analysts[1] have calculated that flash memory can be written to at full speed continuously for 51 years before exceeding its write endurance"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory#Limitations
 
Thanks for the informative reply. Guess there really isn't anything to worry about :D
 
No worries, I think the only thing you will have to worry about is decreasing battery life, but you will have probably replaced it by then anyway!
 
The Flash memory used in the iPhone has a relatively limited endurance of "only" 5,000 program/erase cycles.

Even with a limit of 5,000 cycles, that's still a rewrite of a single memory section each day for over 13 years. And in real life, OS algorithms avoid rewriting the same locations. Plus it has spare memory cells to use if/when the main memory sections fail.

So it should last a pretty long time in real operation. But that's why it's not used to store web cache, etc... just rarely changing stuff like media and programs.
 
At the risk of (at least partially) answering my own question I did find this very helpful electronicsweekly.com article:

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/2007/09/05/42117/inside+apples+iphone.htm

Summary of what it has to say about memory:

NAND. 8 or 4 Gbyte. Stores most of the operating system code, music and video files, and other non-volatile stored data.

NOR. System boot code is stored in NOR. There are two NOR chips, one feeding the main ARM CPU and one (4 Mbyte) feeding the Infineon GSM/EDGE RF chip.

Mobile DDR SDRAM (or possibly SRAM). Present as a 'two-package stack'. Amount unspecified. Volatile memory [used for manipulating applications and data].

16-kbyte/16-kbyte code/data cache on the ARM processor.
 
Also keep in mind that unless you're frequently changing up the music that's going into your iPhone, there's not going to be a lot of re-write activity going on with every little sync. Only information that changed since the last sync is re-written.
 
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