alt Hacker NewsI like the fact he's not just verifying all of them each year. AFAICR, reading the flash causes the row to be rewritten with the values just read.
I remember years ago working on the Wii, and there was a restriction on how often you could read the flash to avoid premature wearing. Not sure if that was just the specific type of storage, as googling suggests that NAND is subject to this and NOR isn't. I think pretty much all USB drives now use NOR flash, so maybe this isn't actually an issue any more.
Replies
> reading the flash causes the row to be rewritten
This only happens very rarely, though more frequently as NAND flash goes QLC and beyond.
Besides, other experiments have shown that data remanence is way more of an issue with drives that are almost completely worn out (way beyond their specified TBW) and about to croak. Even then you only get rare bitrot that can be checked for and compensated quite cheaply in most cases.
If you take fresh media, write it just once or a few times at most, use substantial overprovisioning to keep the drive in its fast pseudo-SLC mode, and reread the media periodically, NAND can be a good enough storage system for most casual needs.
reading the flash causes the row to be rewritten with the values just read
DRAM works that way but flash doesn't. Read disturb is a different issue.
pretty much all USB drives now use NOR flash
Nope, NOR flash is much more expensive than NAND so NOR is only used for firmware and everything else is NAND.