Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2023 June 14

= June 14 =

Flash drives
I've never tried one and would like to know if you can delete videos and (or) pictures from a flash drive after you have transferred them to another computer? in other words, are flash drives re-usable? 2601:601:4000:AC50:F9D0:2A3B:4A1A:E3BD (talk) 18:15, 14 June 2023 (UTC)


 * The short answer is yes, a flash drive is re-usable. The longer answer is that flash memory has a finite number of program-erase cycles. This article from 2021 talks about a series of increasingly cheap modern forms of flash memory with worse and worse endurance, where QLC NAND has just 1,000 P/E cycles ... and yet people apparently use this type for SSD drives, that is, as replacements for their hard drives. (It is very fast compared to a magnetic hard drive.) There may be some technical reason why this isn't a terrible idea and why the 1,000 cycles will only be used up very slowly, but I don't know what it is. Card Zero  (talk) 18:45, 14 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Wear leveling is a technique for maximizing the overall life of media with a limited number of erase and rewrite cycles. In a typical consumer computer such as a laptop, parts of the file system may be written once and never updated (such as photo collections), some parts updated infrequently (such as with operating system updates), and others may be updated daily (such as browser cache or page files). If the latter group of files were continuously written to the same physical location on the flash drive, those writes would quickly exceed the expected media life. However, wear leveling prevents this by continuously remapping the logical disk locations to different physical locations, so that the write activity is spread around. This significantly increases the usable life. -- Tom N talk/contrib 01:44, 19 June 2023 (UTC)