4 ms·

I've never actually experienced this on a personal device (anecdata, I know). But my dayjob for many years has been in embedded systems and working with flash

by bradfa 4y ago

I've never actually experienced this on a personal device (anecdata, I know). But my dayjob for many years has been in embedded systems and working with flash devices and even there, as long as you don't design the product to write to the flash in ways which will kill it (aka: Tesla logging and eMMC) then I honestly expect that modern flash devices have quite enough write endurance for >99% of customer uses. Yes, those 1% who wear out their flash are going to be furious and complain online and even just 1% of phone buyers is still millions of people.

vel0city 4y ago
I used to always download lots of podcasts instead of streaming them and had a lot of Spotify auto-playlist saved locally. This used to cause a lot of write cycles on my devices. I would also usually end up with the smaller storage size version of the devices, so it would use a good percentage of the storage for this usage pattern. Eventually the read speeds would get intolerably slow. Launching applications or rehydrating them would take forever as the storage would just be so slow compared to when the device was new. Rebooting would take 10 minutes or more. This failure mode pushed me to upgrade at least twice. I now just stream the majority of my data, and on-board storage has ballooned so I don't end up rewriting that high of a percentage of the overall storage that often. It was easy to cycle through all the storage when the on-board was 16GB but at 128GB+ it takes a bit longer to burn through it all.
JohnFen 4y ago
> I've never actually experienced this on a personal device I haven't, either. But then, I'm aware of the limited life of flash, so I only purchased phones I can put an SD card into, and then almost all of the data I store on the phone gets written to the card. I'd rather wear the card out than the embedded flash.
- bradfa 4y ago
  Have you ever worn out an SD card used in one of your phones?
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    Not yet. I also build robots and various gadgets as a hobby, and most of those write more heavily to SD cards than my phone does. I've only worn out one card in those machines over the years. Flash memory can take a truly huge number of write cycles. But I like replaceable cards anyway. It's a cheap way to minimize the use of on-board flash that is difficult or impossible to replace.

by bradfa 4y ago

vel0city 4y ago

I used to always download lots of podcasts instead of streaming them and had a lot of Spotify auto-playlist saved locally. This used to cause a lot of write cycles on my devices. I would also usually end up with the smaller storage size version of the devices, so it would use a good percentage of the storage for this usage pattern. Eventually the read speeds would get intolerably slow. Launching applications or rehydrating them would take forever as the storage would just be so slow compared to when the device was new. Rebooting would take 10 minutes or more. This failure mode pushed me to upgrade at least twice. I now just stream the majority of my data, and on-board storage has ballooned so I don't end up rewriting that high of a percentage of the overall storage that often. It was easy to cycle through all the storage when the on-board was 16GB but at 128GB+ it takes a bit longer to burn through it all.

JohnFen 4y ago

> I've never actually experienced this on a personal device I haven't, either. But then, I'm aware of the limited life of flash, so I only purchased phones I can put an SD card into, and then almost all of the data I store on the phone gets written to the card. I'd rather wear the card out than the embedded flash.

bradfa 4y ago
Have you ever worn out an SD card used in one of your phones?
- JohnFen 4y ago
  Not yet. I also build robots and various gadgets as a hobby, and most of those write more heavily to SD cards than my phone does. I've only worn out one card in those machines over the years. Flash memory can take a truly huge number of write cycles. But I like replaceable cards anyway. It's a cheap way to minimize the use of on-board flash that is difficult or impossible to replace.