ESP8266 Community Forum

Few times I've heard, that flash chips used id ESP modules are susceptible to damage and in some cases they refuse to work properly after just few dozens of flashing. It sounds very strange for me. I was convinced that flash memory can be re flashed easily tens of thousand or even hundreds of thousand times.
Is it just a myth? Or was that just some small faulty series of this parts? Or is that true? Should I
significantly decrease number of flashing, during experiments with that module?

Atlantis wrote:Few times I've heard, that flash chips used id ESP modules are susceptible to damage and in some cases they refuse to work properly after just few dozens of flashing. It sounds very strange for me. I was convinced that flash memory can be re flashed easily tens of thousand or even hundreds of thousand times.
Is it just a myth? Or was that just some small faulty series of this parts? Or is that true? Should I
significantly decrease number of flashing, during experiments with that module?

In my test rig, I've been using the same two ESP-01s for almost 8 months, with no problems. Anyway, at $3 a module...go nuts

More important - in your applications try to avoid frequent writes to the flash. That's going to be harder on the flash than flashing new firmware.

kenn wrote:In my test rig, I've been using the same two ESP-01s for almost 8 months, with no problems. Anyway, at $3 a module...go nuts

I know it is super cheap and (in case of any problems) flash chip can be easily replaced. But I just don't like the perspective of damaging module during development stage, than replacing it, then damaging again and so on, until code will be finished... This is just not right.

More important - in your applications try to avoid frequent writes to the flash. That's going to be harder on the flash than flashing new firmware.

Usually I try not to use this functionality, at least not to often. It is one thing to write some configuration options to the flash, from time to time, but not large amounts of data, which will be discarded and replaced soon. In that case I would rather use FatFS + SD card + softSPI (or hwSPI on ESP12E module).