Hacker News Reader

Comment by staindk | Hacker News Reader

In the same vein as this I've wondered for a couple years now what the impact of flash storage longevity is on mobile phone performance over time. Felt like my Samsung S8 was very snappy when I got it, yet a couple years later things that used to be fast - like finding specific music, scrolling through the photos in my gallery, etc. - had slowed down considerably.

Could also just be software updates or other things causing this but there should be some component of decreasing performance caused by wear on flash storage.

View on HN

You're right, flash degradation and deterioration of write speeds is pretty much primary reason why older phones feel slow and laggy.

A lot of - especially older or mid/low range - phones have cheap eMMC storage which is signifcantly worse at wear leveling than the higher end UFS storage.

Could you get around this by using a custom ROM that installs the OS on a high-quality microSD card or something like that?

> phones have cheap eMMC storage which is signifcantly worse at wear leveling than the higher end UFS storage.

Which is shocking really - the phones should switch the eMMC to RAW flash mode (ie. no wear levelling), and then write an actually-smart wear levelling algorithm that runs in the OS.

The OS has far better info for wear levelling anyway - it has more visibility into read-write patterns, it has more RAM to store more state, it can cron background scrubs and reorganisation to idle periods, it can be patched if a bug is found which only manifests after years, etc.

Unfortunately, as far as I'm aware, most eMMC's can't be put into any kind of RAW mode anyway.

The only part of a far future sci-fi that stayed with me is the use of memory chips as universal (ha) currency :ie capacity was face value and then total value was determined by the data contained on the chip and how much someone(thing) wanted that. Sometimes it looks like that is an inevitable outcome.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com