Is too much flashing bad for our phones? I've seen people asking sellers how many times they've flashed their phones with custom ROMs and this worries me . I do do a task 29 before every flash btw... Just wondering of any side effects of over-flashing.
you can do around 100,000 to 1,000,000 read/write operations to each cell in flash memory before it starts to enter danger territory.
So no, its very unlikely to cause any issues unless you change rom every day for 30 years.
(in theory, anyway, anyone stress tested the flashing process?)
This is news to me!
I didn't know flashing could damage a phone!
But surly you'd have to flash 100's/1000's of times before that!?
only an idiot wouldn't read up on each rom and flash after flash after flash afte... (you get my point lol)
lonelykatana said:
only an idiot wouldn't read up on each rom and flash after flash after flash afte... (you get my point lol)
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you, sir, are clearly NOT a Beta Tester
uh oh!
Dear readers,
This is really a valid topic - flashing is a bad bad thing.
Especially out side of schools.....get u in all sorts of trouble.
- I flash every few days - end up spending my friday nights doing it sometimes - thats gotta be bad news!!
Yeah, it's not so much how often you do it.
The fact is, each time you flash, you risk bricking your phone.
The Law of Averages will run into Murphy's Law at some point and you're gonna be screwed ;-)
I've flashed my Excalibur about 20 times, my Wing about 30, my Kaiser 12 and my Rhodium 3 times (HardSPL, Radios don't count!). I haven't bricked a phone since 2007, but sooner or later this will catch up to me too :-D
I'm flashing many years many times a day and never bricked a phone.
5 to 10 times a day believe it or not.
Knock on wood.
Snarksneeze said:
Yeah, it's not so much how often you do it.
The fact is, each time you flash, you risk bricking your phone.
The Law of Averages will run into Murphy's Law at some point and you're gonna be screwed ;-)
I've flashed my Excalibur about 20 times, my Wing about 30, my Kaiser 12 and my Rhodium 3 times (HardSPL, Radios don't count!). I haven't bricked a phone since 2007, but sooner or later this will catch up to me too :-D
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Click to collapse
General everyday read/writes to the filesystem represent a LOT more wear than 10, 100 or 1000 ROM flashes during the phone's life.
Well, every Data the phone saves on its internal memory and every Data thats viewed by you (includes booting) will read/write the internal memory.
Flash Memory has a limited lifetime due its material wearout.
If you will ever get to this point within warrenty it maybe covered .
Only think you can do against it is to take out battery and never ever touch your phone.
I remember maybe a couple of years ago in the Touch Pro forums, there were a few cases of people "killing" there Touch Pros by overflashing. This worried me for a while, but since I only ever reflash probably about once a week and buy/sell every 6-12 months, I don't think it will ever cause me a problem.
I haven't seen a recurrance of this problem since my Touch Pro days, so maybe something was different about that particular device. But now I feel like I've tempted fate, I'm not gonna say any more!
SAME
Laurentius26 said:
I'm flashing many years many times a day and never bricked a phone.
5 to 10 times a day believe it or not.
Knock on wood.
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Click to collapse
I have flashed many times a day including beta testing for many roms/phones currently my HTC G1 is acting really wierd lately ever since I flashed that EXTREMLY SUPER FAST ROM and its been acting as if it were bricked at times, it wont even boot up it gives me that black screen (when you have a brick) so im going to an OEM rom and stop flashing for that phone now just to be safe
But I think I have flashed THOUSANDS of times my 2 EXCALIBURS, WING, TILT, TILT2, G1, Mytouch, and my cool new HD2 and not a SINGLE BRICKED
Im soo proud of myself haha lol
Laurentius26 said:
I'm flashing many years many times a day and never bricked a phone.
5 to 10 times a day believe it or not.
Knock on wood.
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Click to collapse
lol i flash as much myself
Related
Okay when i originally debranded my phone i flashed it about 6 times, now i told a mate, to which he replied "be careful because phones can only handle so much before the phone will break". Now obviously there must be some sort of limit, but what sorta number am i looking at?
Thanks
Vengeance
lol, "6", I've done that in a day, a few times, not sure, never even entered my mind in fact that there might be a limit.
theoretically, there is a limit on how often a memory module can be flashed. but it's somewhere around a few thousand times, if not more.... definately nowhere near 6
I've done more than 6 times in a day when we got 1st root & it was kinda difficult to root
beno1 said:
theoretically, there is a limit on how often a memory module can be flashed. but it's somewhere around a few thousand times, if not more.... definately nowhere near 6
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let him try, then he will say oh the flashing limit is a gazillion times
hey just wondering, is there a limit on how man times u can flash ur nand on hd2. cause i have already flashed mine like 20 times, but just wondering to be on the safe side.
20 times, as most on here will probably tell you is amateur season..lol.
Seriously tho'......I don't wanna even think about how many times i've flashed...lol....scary.
Ok, i will think.....probably 1-3 times a day for nand since the very first day nand was out and probably total flashes ever since i ownded my hd2 = 700-1000 times...lol
hd2 is stronggggggg as long as u look after it.
matt
ps: OMG...i've just realised a maths equation: amount of flashes = me= no life!! lol
matthew33 said:
20 times, as most on here will probably tell you is amateur season..lol.
Seriously tho'......I don't wanna even think about how many times i've flashed...lol....scary.
Ok, i will think.....probably 1-3 times a day for nand since the very first day nand was out and probably total flashes ever since i ownded my hd2 = 700-1000 times...lol
hd2 is stronggggggg as long as u look after it.
matt
ps: OMG...i've just realised a maths equation: amount of flashes = me= no life!! lol
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Click to collapse
HAHA......well i just got my hd2 like a month ago and didnt know anything about it, until i found this angelic website on google.
Considering moderm flash memories, the number would be in tens of thousands before the internal flash/nand gives away.
all i did was install CM7 nightly 41 after a full wipe, all went well. then installed titanium backup, restored all apps, then went to recovery and installed gapps, powered back up, and it tried to sync and it froze up, so after a while i pulled battery and pow no power!!! uh oh? any ideas?
Does it light up when you charge it?
Sent from my HTC Desire Z/G2 Using XDA Premium App
nope. i think its a total brick.
when i plugged it into computer the computer did attempt to install software (bubble on lower right of screen near clock that pops up saying new hardware found) but failed to install properly
holy crap tmo takes up to 7 days for an exchange to be shipped!!!! wtf???
verizon gives free 2 day exchange via fedex. tmo does it for 20 bucks for 3-5 days!! unreal. im starting to hate tmo more and more
tackleberry said:
holy crap tmo takes up to 7 days for an exchange to be shipped!!!! wtf???
verizon gives free 2 day exchange via fedex. tmo does it for 20 bucks for 3-5 days!! unreal. im starting to hate tmo more and more
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Click to collapse
Yea.. I hate that too. It doesnt really take that long though. You should get it in 5 days the latest.
Sent from my HTC Desire Z/G2 Using XDA Premium App
yea i bought a nokia prepaid X2 as a spare so i can at least get email. my old spare isnt great its a nokia 6310i lol. it works great as a phone but nothing more.
according to ups ground, its 4 days from texas to me, so tuesday i should see my refurb crap again lol.
just irritating, they wanna charge 20 bucks for 3 day shipping....verizon charged 10 for overnight and free for 2 day. unreal. i just dont understand how it failed like that. i did nothing different when changing roms! my phone was running like crap after i wiped and installed virtuous sense on it, so i wiped again and flashed CM back on, and it just bugged the hell out! any idea why it would brick like that?
Holding power+volume down doesn't work?
This may sound silly. But have you tried a battery pull?
You seem kind of stupid, you supposedly brick your phone and before anyone can try to help you call tmobile and tell them to replace it, then complain about how long it takes them to replace your screw up.
Sent from my HTC Desire Z/G2 using XDA App
ionic7 said:
You seem kind of stupid, you supposedly brick your phone and before anyone can try to help you call tmobile and tell them to replace it, then complain about how long it takes them to replace your screw up.
Sent from my HTC Desire Z/G2 using XDA App
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And in the process make the cell phones and rate plans cost more for everyone else cause yet another a-hole wants there warranty honored when they knowingly VOIDED the warranty. Getting so tired of this. Between people bypassing paying for tethering and OVERLY taking advantage, and bull**** like returning phones that you KNOWINGLY VOIDED THE WARRANTY WHEN YOU ROOTED AND INSTALLED THAT CUSTOM ROM on it, it is ZERO wonder why they all want to sign the god dam bootloader anymore. These may be evil corporations were dealing with, but there is still a difference between right and wrong. These few on xda will ultimately be our downfall. This thread is all kinda fail.
Edit: sorry for sounding so harsh but you could have waited for at least a LITTLE bit of help first. it sounds like something not that out of our league to have fixed.
Sent from my HTC Vision using XDA Premium App
Edit: double post. Everytime I go to edit on the new xda prem app I accidentally hit quote!
battery pull yes, vol down and pwr nothing. charged it overnight, and led didnt even power up, tried 2 different batteries, etc. nothing.
i dont know why it bricked, i did nothing different than what was done before to it. any time i ever did have problems was with the bootanimation screen would stay on and device would never boot, but i was still able to fix that with a full wipe and fresh reinstall. this was maybe a hardware failure of some sort? ive done all the same stuff to my mt4g (went from iced glacier to CM7, been on CM7 since nightly 6 or 8 with that one), and for a longer amount of time now and no issues at all. funny thing is i dont even flash nightly, or weekly...usually about 10-14 days ill flash an updated newer rom. now i know some of you people here are major fanatics about flashing nightly, changing radios constantly, kernels, amongst other things...i do half of that stuff and at probably a tenth of the rate that some of you hardcore folks do. so before you wanna pass judgement, i have been doing this same stuff since november on 3 different phones and never had a problem since yesterday at random. so i dont know why some of you get pissed when people have defective equipment. id guess if my hinge broke you would be telling me it was because of flashing roms too??? my rom was already flashed, working, and then when email was syncing it locked up, did a battery pull and nothing worked since. get a grip folks, crap happens. its not like i improperly flashed a non sense rom direct over a sense rom then back again with no wiping, clearing cache, data, etc etc etc then flash 3 incorrect kernels and bad themes and so on. if my device at least would power up, i wouldnt have decided to have it exchanged under warranty because i probably would have been able to fix it somehow since there are write ups about semi bricked devices. even plugging it into the computer does nothing now.
We have been looking into this issue on IRC for the past week or so. ANYONE WHO IS HAVING THIS ISSUE NEEDS TO STOP BY THE IRC CHANNEL.
We need to get some more info, right now we only have 2 cases to go on.
irc.freenode.net
#G2ROOT
tackleberry said:
battery pull yes, vol down and pwr nothing. charged it overnight, and led didnt even power up, tried 2 different batteries, etc. nothing.
i dont know why it bricked, i did nothing different than what was done before to it. any time i ever did have problems was with the bootanimation screen would stay on and device would never boot, but i was still able to fix that with a full wipe and fresh reinstall. this was maybe a hardware failure of some sort? ive done all the same stuff to my mt4g (went from iced glacier to CM7, been on CM7 since nightly 6 or 8 with that one), and for a longer amount of time now and no issues at all. funny thing is i dont even flash nightly, or weekly...usually about 10-14 days ill flash an updated newer rom. now i know some of you people here are major fanatics about flashing nightly, changing radios constantly, kernels, amongst other things...i do half of that stuff and at probably a tenth of the rate that some of you hardcore folks do. so before you wanna pass judgement, i have been doing this same stuff since november on 3 different phones and never had a problem since yesterday at random. so i dont know why some of you get pissed when people have defective equipment. id guess if my hinge broke you would be telling me it was because of flashing roms too??? my rom was already flashed, working, and then when email was syncing it locked up, did a battery pull and nothing worked since. get a grip folks, crap happens. its not like i improperly flashed a non sense rom direct over a sense rom then back again with no wiping, clearing cache, data, etc etc etc then flash 3 incorrect kernels and bad themes and so on. if my device at least would power up, i wouldnt have decided to have it exchanged under warranty because i probably would have been able to fix it somehow since there are write ups about semi bricked devices. even plugging it into the computer does nothing now.
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Click to collapse
Hello, I'm new to the whole Android thing, but I managed to recently root my Shift, and I can attest to the addictive properties of trying out ROMS/Kernels and all that good stuff. But I was worried about the idea of all this flashing I'm doing, as in the month or so I've been rooted I've flashed about four ROMS, messed up a few times, done a good 5 or 6 Nandroid restores/backups. I was just curios to know if this is excessive, or if this could damage my phone in any way. Thanks for any help guys!
P.S., I apologize if this is either in the wrong thread, or has already been answered >_< I'm still a young'un
As far as I know by flashing a lot you can damage the relationship with your wife or g/f due to spending a lot of time doing it.. besides that I believe that the only way you can damage your phone is due to a bad flash or flashing something that wasn't exactly supported by the Shift.
I recall this discussion back when I had a TouchPro2, I don't know if it applies to the Shift as well but I assume it does. From my understanding it was determined by people far more informed than me that flashing would eventually wear out the NAND memory...but it would take more flashes than even the most fiendish flashaholic could complete in the phones lifetime to do. This is what I know from discussions of a past phone, I'm not claiming anything about the lifetime of the phone and take no responsibility if you flash 5000 ROMS tonight and your NAND burns out. lol
I think the only way you can actually brick your phone from flashing is if you flash a bad ratio from like a gsm carrier to a cdma phone. Might be wrong. Cause even if you flash a bad rom as long as you have a working recovery you can always just reflash a new rom or ruu
I think his underlying question may have to do with the fact that every NAND flash memory module has a limited number of writes in its lifetime before it can't write another bit and tell whether or not the module is in the 0 or 1 state.
This is also why data2ext/apps2ext etc anything that constantly writes information to your SD card will also degrade the lifetime of the SD card.
Basically yes, in principle the number of times you write new data to the phone's built-in memory, you shave off another write from its life. But I don't think this is significant at all. Just as a reference, I'm sure there are people with the original G1 who have flashed a countless number of times over several years and still have it working.
^^This.
If it gives you peace of mind, think about how many times a ROM chef's phone gets flashed in its lifetime and usually if the phone dies it's on account of flashing something experimental that bricks the phone (wrong radio, etc.) I've never heard of someones NAND actually burning out. I flashed my TouchPro and TouchPro2 quite literally hundreds of times if that makes you feel better.
kbrn said:
As far as I know by flashing a lot you can damage the relationship with your wife or g/f due to spending a lot of time doing it.. besides that I believe that the only way you can damage your phone is due to a bad flash or flashing something that wasn't exactly supported by the Shift.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
THIS. Main danger.
^ Shift Faced
jesusice said:
THIS. Main danger.
^ Shift Faced
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Click to collapse
Agreed!
Sent from my PG06100 using XDA Premium App
Thanks for all the answers, you guys are great I really appreciate your help. You're replies have put my mind at ease seeing as my level of flashing honestly doesn't seem that excessive compared to that of a developer's.
Sent from my PG06100 using XDA App
On my HeroC I changed roms two to three times a week. When CM6 came out, it was everyday (with full wipe) thanks to the nightlies. Then aosp started releasing his stuff in IRC yada yada.
My heroc made it well over a year of that torture. My wife did as well, barely.
Dear all,
Maybe strange.........
I just cant brick my note! Not that i want to but how? before i knew the brickbug i did:
Odin flash to a leak ICS
Rebooted in CWM And wiped Factory default.. No problem
At one time i even formatted EMMC however its called.
At this time ICS brickbug shows up in this forum and i downloaded the APK brickbug app and i seem to be vulnarable.
Today a friend comes in with a bricked note.. tellin me he was flshing from odin and it hung on first part of flash without starting. He removed phone after 30 secs.
please take notice that it can take up to 2 minutes to start flashing.
any thoughts on this story?
jeroen180 said:
Dear all,
Maybe strange.........
I just cant brick my note! Not that i want to but how? before i knew the brickbug i did:
Odin flash to a leak ICS
Rebooted in CWM And wiped Factory default.. No problem
At one time i even formatted EMMC however its called.
At this time ICS brickbug shows up in this forum and i downloaded the APK brickbug app and i seem to be vulnarable.
Today a friend comes in with a bricked note.. tellin me he was flshing from odin and it hung on first part of flash without starting. He removed phone after 30 secs.
please take notice that it can take up to 2 minutes to start flashing.
any thoughts on this story?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Go to the church and donate 10 euros...
You might not be so lucky next time around.
Because you didn't brick doing 1 wipe, doesn't mean that you cannot brick..
It's like getting struck by lightning, maybe you will survive the first, but it
might not save you a second time...
Well, it is a brick bug, so it is only a chance - not definitive. I have stock ICS infected with the bug, but haven't nor plan on flashing or anything like that so...
friedje said:
Go to the church and donate 10 euros...
You might not be so lucky next time around.
Because you didn't brick doing 1 wipe, doesn't mean that you cannot brick..
It's like getting struck by lightning, maybe you will survive the first, but it
might not save you a second time...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Back on first HTC android phone )G1) i got it bricked 3 times by flashing SPL 3 times. Anywayz Android is much better (for me) then IOS from crapple. Only HTC dreams where crap in quality since the board has been replaced 5 times due hardware failures...
Now back on business:
I know im lucky. But still .. what causes the randomness of bricking. I mean it is there or it is not? Maybe god exists. I love my note too much to brick it
jeroen180 said:
Back on first HTC android phone )G1) i got it bricked 3 times by flashing SPL 3 times. Anywayz Android is much better (for me) then IOS from crapple. Only HTC dreams where crap in quality since the board has been replaced 5 times due hardware failures...
Now back on business:
I know im lucky. But still .. what causes the randomness of bricking. I mean it is there or it is not? Maybe god exists. I love my note too much to brick it
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It isn't random. There are just multiple conditions that need to come together to trigger it. Read the thread about it to understand better the hows and why's.
friedje said:
It isn't random. There are just multiple conditions that need to come together to trigger it. Read the thread about it to understand better the hows and why's.
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Click to collapse
Even if all the conditions are met there's still a good chance it won't happen. IIRC there are also versions of emmc chips that don't have the brickbug.
pboesboes said:
Even if all the conditions are met there's still a good chance it won't happen. IIRC there are also versions of emmc chips that don't have the brickbug.
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Click to collapse
Well the fact of having a dangerous chip is one of the conditions....
So if you don't have it then not ALL the conditions are met..
Believe me if all the conditions are met, it will brick, it"s not random.
Then, Jeroen stated that he tested with Chainfires app, and he does have the faulty chip.
Finally I haven't seen a Note in the wild yet that doesn't have a faulty chip.
I feel like the OP. Before I knew of the bug I flashed and wiped many times. But I only flash stock roms. I don't know if that helped or not.
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