I've wondered about this, and don't have any definitive answer to this. However, there are several factors involved. Flash memory involves rewriting entire chunks of data, often larger than a single block, when a single block is written. This can affect how often a given location is written. Remapping to other locations so that the same location isn't written repeatedly (wear leveling) is one technique developed to offset this. This is included in the controller for SD chips. So thanks to this, you won't actually be writing to the same block over and over. Probably the controller for the non-SD memory is similar.
I think this is something that manufacturers have been working to improve, and I don't know what the current limits are, nor what type of memory is used in the phones, but Wikipedia mentions a limit of 100,000 erase cycles for SLC memory. When combined with wear leveling, that's quite a lot. And the phones may not be using SLC memory. But I suspect it's not high enough that this is NEVER an issue. I'd recommend against intensive writing to the filesystem in any event, for performance and possibly battery life reasons. On Apr 3, 9:49 am, Nadav <nad...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi All, > > I'm wondering how worried should I be about writing an app that does a > lot of writing (logs + db files) to the phone's main memory. > > In the past I was involved in a project that had to do a lot of > writing to SD card, and the SD cards started malfunctioning after 2-3 > months due to this, and had to be replaced every now and then. The > developer realized he was reaching the flash memory's read/write > guarantees (don't remember the exact specs). > > If the phone's main memory is also flash based, should this be a > concern? I wouldn't want to damage the phone's memory in a permanent > way.... > > I'm also not sure if the issue is related to reading writing to the > same physical block (the guy was using a single log file and kept > appending it, so he was constantly accessing the file's header block), > and whether writing cyclic log files might remedy a problem like > this.. > > Would appreciate any thoughts on this issue. > > Thanks! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en To unsubscribe, reply using "remove me" as the subject.
