Their memory chips often include circuitry to avoid “bad bits”. Error correction and wear levelingįlash drives have a couple of features to try to avoid wearing out. It may only take a single bit of information to be wrong or to “wear out” for the entire contents of a flash memory chip to be lost. When the limit is reached, some portion of the memory may not properly remember what was written to it.

The problem is, memory can be flashed only so many times.

Once the memory has been “flashed”, power can be completely removed and the memory will retain whatever was written to it. Putting the flash in flash memoryįlash memory chips are so-called because in order to write to them, the memory is loaded, and then a signal is sent to the circuitry saying “remember this”, kind of like the flash on a camera. SSDs, also based on a type of flash memory, are generally more expensive, higher quality, and will probably outlast the useful life of the machines in which they’re used. Inexpensive flash drives are not appropriate for high-write usage because they wear out the more they are written to.

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