Dingoo A320 forum

I am a compulsive saver -- I tend to hit save every few minutes or whenever I hit a key milestone like beginning of a turn, etc.

My understanding has always been that while flash memory tends to have a high # of possible times you can write to it before it fails, there *is* a finite limit. Given that (a) with the dingoo, all saves tend to be written to the same internal flash memory instead of spread out among lots of different game cartridges, and (b) internal flash memory is not really user-replaceable (at least not by *this* user!) -- I think you can see where I am going with this. Say that I play an average of 10 hours a week, saving every 3 minutes or so. That's 200 writes per week or over 10,000 per year.

What's the expert opinion out there? Is this a valid fear and, if so, any thoughts about best ways to work around it? My only thought so far has been to try to move any game I play and save frequently to a minisd card. If I play it off the card, does the dingoo write the save state directly to the card, or does it write first to the internal flash and then copy it to the card (which would get me nowhere!)

I realize that the "best" solution would be to retrain myself to stop saving so compulsively, but it's really instinctive by now after working with all manner of finicky computers and consoles for 25 years...

you're looking at a minimum 100,000 writes before the possibility of degredation starts, so 10 years on your schedule, although it's likely that the chip itself will start to degrade before then anyway.

There's no reason why saves wouldnt be written directly to the card if the game itself was on there.

It's not something I would worry about.

jasha wrote:you're looking at a minimum 100,000 writes before the possibility of degredation starts, so 10 years on your schedule, although it's likely that the chip itself will start to degrade before then anyway.

There's no reason why saves wouldnt be written directly to the card if the game itself was on there.

It's not something I would worry about.

After further investigation it looks like Samsung MLC NAND has about 10,000 write cycles so I'll redo the calculations. To make an estimate we have to guess a save size, so I'll say about 512 kilobytes which is about the size of a GBA save state. 512 kilobytes * 10,000 writes = approx. 4.883 gigabytes. If 512 megabytes were free, that would be about 10 writes to each sector of memory in a year. So at that pace he'd have about 1,000 years of usability, assuming something else doesn't kill the Dingoo first.

So, pinata, you calculate write cycles or whatever by number of times physically written to any given sector, rather than total # of writes on the whole thing? That would make sense, and certainly would make it last longer. (Though realistically, the writes wouldn't be spread out evenly -- some save files would be written and never deleted or overwritten, so those sectors would drop out of the pool of available sectors...)

The process of wear leveling does spread out the writes evenly. The flash memory is spit into blocks which each have a rated lifetime of 10,000 writes, and a controller manages when each block was last used. When you overwrite your last save the controller erases the previous data and finds a new location with the least number of writes to write the new data. More interesting is static wear leveling, which wear levels both static and dynamic data. So with the 4.883 gigabytes of writes on a 4 gigabyte drive, even static files like the emulator or rom files would be rewritten to different blocks eventually. So with static wear leveling with the 10,000 writes of 512 kilobytes a year you would have only expended about one and a quarter write cycles out of ten thousand.

In short you really don't have to worry about killing your drive because even with the 512 KB writes 10,000 times per year and 5MB free. You'd still get 10 years out of those blocks of memory with dynamic wear leveling. And guess what happens when they go bad? They're deleted from the memory map and the rest of the drive keeps on working as if nothing happened.