Flash memory - Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

# Flash memory

### From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Flash memory is a memory storage device for computers and electronics. It is most often used in devices like digital cameras, USB flash drives, and video games. It is quite similar to EEPROM.

Flash memory is different from RAM because RAM is volatile (not permanent). When power is turned off, RAM loses all its data. Flash can keep its data intact, with no power at all. A hard drive also is permanent (non-volatile) storage, but it is bulky and fragile. Flash memory is much slower than RAM or hard drives. But it is great for small electronics because it is small and it has no moving parts.

The main weakness of flash memory is the number of times that data can be written to it. Data can be read from flash as many times as desired, but after a certain number of "write" operations, it will fail. Most flash devices are designed for about 100,000 - 1,000,000 write operations (or "write cycles").

EEPROM has the same limitation that flash does: it can only survive about 100,000 write cycles. But it is more expensive than flash, so it is usually not used for storage greater than 128kB. The main difference between EEPROM and flash memory is that EEPROM can "write" to any byte of memory, at any time. Flash memory can only write to an entire chunk, or "sector", of memory at a time. That means that if the user wants to change only one byte, flash must also re-write all the bytes in that sector. This means that flash memory can wear out faster than EEPROM.

But in some cases Flash drives can also be volatile, This is because the information is stored in the same way as RAM and the memory starts back up when the USB Flash drive is plugged into the computer.

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Category: Computing

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