I believe it's that you can't read that small an amount at once; AIUI most memory will only let you read to the byte at most and then you'd have to do some bit-

I believe it's that you can't read that small an amount at once; AIUI most memory will only let you read to the byte at most and then you'd have to do some bit-fiddling to pull out individual bits, and I vaguely recall that flash is often only read/write-able in like 4k blocks at a time, so if you want to know the first bit on the device what you actually do is copy the first 4kB into RAM then grab the first byte of the result and AND it with 1<<64 to isolate just the first bit