ESP8266 Community Forum

- Tue Aug 18, 2015 4:37 am #26339

Thank you for your response. Does the flash memory have a finite number of writes?

AFIK all flash memory has a finite amount of writes. However the number of writes varies depending on the technology used in the Flash memory.

I think 10,000 writes is a typical number quoted for most normal Flash.

Really this number is not the number of writes, its the number of erases, but you need to erase before you can write.
And you can't just erase one byte, (location), you have to erase a whole page of flash memory.

There are plenty of articles on the web that describe this process and optimization of memory erase cycles so as not to wear out one specific page of flash

- Wed Aug 19, 2015 11:22 am #26480 Use flash memory without any worries for configurations, preferences and all variables that are written a few times and read many times.
It's also suitable for logging daily data, as will likely wear out because of other factors.
It's not suitable for millisecond logging, for that kind of things an SD card is better.

Flash memory life is rated for at least 10000 cicles, some chips may get get lucky and get until 200k writes before the first fault, but if you plan to do thousands of changes it will wear out eventually.