how many times can you flash before the bios goes bad?

[benjamit]

i talked to a tech guy a few years ago and he said the general rule of thumb is 50 times

but i think that he may have made this up

has anyone ever flashed their bios so often that the bios chip goes bad?

how many times can you flash safely?

or do people replace their boards before their bios chips so bad?

and is changing the settings in bios the same as flashing in terms of having the bios chip going bad?

 

[mk52]

your bios is saved on flash memory, which can be overwritten thousands if not millions of times.
Your board will probably be antique by the time you wont be able to flash your bios anymore.

-MeliK

 

[benjamit]

flash memory is not as durable as hdd memory, right?

floppy memory is pretty unreliable due to dust and physical damage?

 

[rommel]

well i asked that owl ...uh and he said 3

 

[Helznicht]

Thats Mr. Owl.....

As many times as you want (until you get that mis-timed power surge)

 

[CQuinn]

<< the general rule of thumb is 50 times >>



Since the odds are you would never see half that many BIOS updates in the lifetime of
the device, then that's a fairly safe &quot;rule of thumb&quot; even though it may not apply
to the hardware itself. I assume you are talking about motherboards specifically
and not other devices like SCSI cards?

You can flash a BIOS and have the update go bad, thru power loss or other write error,
but chances are you will never have a BIOS go bad from being overflashed.

Even the earliest flash memory designs allowed for several thousand rewrites before
&quot;wearing down&quot;, now the cycles are in the millions; and so reliable that many people
are looking into using flash as a replacement for magnetic disks in some standard
storage devices.

People do usually replace the boards long before the flash is likely to run out. Even
those who are likely to flash the BIOS every day over a five year period would only
make a drop in the bucket compared to what the FlashRAM could take.

Changing settings in the system setup are saved in a form of battery backed RAM
typically referred to as the CMOS. So changing settings there should not have
any effect on the BIOS.

 

[bacillus]

<< how many times can you flash before the bios goes bad? >>


good question! now are there any more good questions!

 

[benjamit]

thanks guys

long answers give me confidence in the answerer and the information passed

though the short ones make me realize that life's too short to worry about the little things

 

[samgau]

There was a news article not too long ago about a new type of eeprom(the kind used for bioses i think) with unlimited # of write cycles... the article had some good info about existing eprom and flash eprom...
according to this site, flash eprom has a 10yr 100,000 erasure/rewrite cycles
linky

 

[shathal]

Flash memory has come a long way - realistically, this really not something I would worry about. And even if it were that your EEPROM were to go bad, just RMA the board ...

I've heard of it - never seen it happen myself ... and that's ample opportunity, let me tell you .

 

[jamarno]

Try the website of a chip maker, like Intel, Seeq, or NEC.

The worst figure I saw the last time I checked a few years ago was 1,000 writes, with 10,000 being more typical, and some EEPROMs were rated for 100,000 writes. I know of only instance where an EEPROM was worn out from excessive writes, in a modem operated by software that for some reason rewrote the EEPROM every time it dialed a number.

 

[Bozz]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but dont the Sony Memory Sticks (MS!) use flash EEPROMs?
I would kind of hope that it's not 50, or a thousand because I've certainly exceeded both figures