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I have been told that frequently 'full erasing' memory sticks can damage them. Is this true? I work in a situation where the same sticks are re-used numerous times.

DavidPostill
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Mac
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  • A user has no actual "full erasing" capability that corresponds to the electrical operation at the NAND flash chip level. So exactly what are you calling an "erasure"? Overwriting the entire drive is just one more erase-write cycle in the drive's life. – sawdust Dec 05 '23 at 06:18

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Overwriting entire flash drive with zeros or full formatting will significantly shorten its lifespan.

However, simply quick-formatting or just deleting all files off the drive is completely safe and doesn't wear it more than regular usage.

gronostaj
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  • But overwriting the whole drive or full-formatting it is no worse than writing data to the whole drive, right? – David Richerby Jul 31 '15 at 10:03
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    @DavidRicherby You are correct. But note that simply deleting files from a full drive (or quick-formatting it) wears flash much less than full-formatting because it only alters file indices, while full format erases data completely. – gronostaj Jul 31 '15 at 10:13
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Flash memory cells don't keep working forever. The more times each cell is written to, the more it degrades. Wikipedia states that typical memory sticks are only designed to have each cell written to a few thousand times before the degradation causes data corruption.

Most devices use a technique called "wear levelling" that attempts to spread writes around the memory. That means you're not constantly hammering the same cells and causing them to fail when the rest of the memory is still fresh. Because of wear levelling, a USB flash drive should last until the amount of data that has been written to it is approximately a few thousand times its capacity. For example, a gigabyte drive should be able to cope with a few terabytes of data being written to it, over its lifetime.

I'm not sure what you mean by "full erasing" but I guess it means either overwriting all the data on the card or overwriting the entire card. That has just the same effect as writing the same amount of data, in terms of memory wear. So, for example, writing a megabyte of data and then overwriting it all should have roughly the same effect, in the long term, as just writing two megabytes of data. Reformatting the flash drive should have roughly the same effect as completely filling the card with data.

So, long story short, if every time you write data to the drive, you eventually delete it by overwriting, that should roughly halve the life of the drive (as compared to a standard operating system delete, which just marks the areas of the card as unused, without overwriting the data stored there). Maybe you care about that; maybe you don't. It would have been good for a few thousand uses; now you can "only" use it a couple of thousand times.

If you delete by reformatting, the drive will wear faster: if you fill the drive to x-percent, then reformat, you're writing as much data as you would if you filled it to (100+x)-percent. If you just deleted the data, you'd be able to use the drive a few thousand times 100/x times; reformatting means you only get to use it a few thousand times 100/(100+x) times. The life of the card is reduced by a factor of (100+x)/x. For example, by a factor of three if you only half-filled it, and by a factor of 11 if you were only 10%-filling it.

Dave M
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David Richerby
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As far as I know, USB sticks should last AT LEAST 2.5 Years and at most 10 years. Quick formatting just deletes the files inside and should cause none if not miniscule damage however FULL formating zeroes out the whole USB stick causing it to lose all data without recovery.

That will wear it out A LOT and take a lot of time to do so! You can make your own quick format by deleting all files inside and you're done. All files gone, that's called manual quick formating. They may be still recoverable but not really... USB sticks are just SSDs at the size of a thumbnail.

A 1GB - 15GB USB stick should last a minimum of 5k writes and a max 100k+ writes. Basically TBs of reads and writes. Be cool, and don't worry much. That re-usal of USB sticks should be monitored and if a USB stick is less than 2.5 years, you're good unless they were being written 24/7 consider getting a new one then. If at about 5 years, you're still good but consider getting a new USB stick to backup it's data incase of corruption cause it might brick out. If over 7 years, consider replacing it. If over 10 years, throw it out, it's severely damaged and worn out that it can't really hold anymore charges...

Eniel Gladiator
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