Random fact- NAND flash endurance on recent Wifi 7 routers

[RMerlin]

Fun fact: some of the Wifi 7 (I only checked my RT-BE92U and RT-BE96U, it's possible they use it for many Wifi 7 models) use the MX30LF2G28AD SLC NAND flash, which can handle up to 60K erase cycles.

 

[Analog-1]

How many erase cycles can the average wifi 6 router handle ?

 

[Justinh]

Would that be the same as 60k hard resets?

 

[mellifluous]

That is a lot of firmware upgrades!!

 

[sfx2000]

Fun fact: some of the Wifi 7 (I only checked my RT-BE92U and RT-BE96U, it's possible they use it for many Wifi 7 models) use the MX30LF2G28AD SLC NAND flash, which can handle up to 60K erase cycles.

Keep in mind that every write cycle in NAND has to erase a entire block and then rewrite the data due to how NAND works... which is important for tasks that write to the flash - this likely would mean the third party scripts that do a fair amount of writes...

My most recent project used Winbond 32MB SPI-NOR - and it should be good for 100K write/erase cycles per their docs - and since it's NOR, it's only the specific addresses needed - even there, we kept writes to a minimum, storing config data only - logs were all in RAM... I think part of the endurance on these devices are because of automotive usage, where lifetime considerations are more than a couple of years...

 

[sfx2000]

Fun fact: some of the Wifi 7 (I only checked my RT-BE92U and RT-BE96U, it's possible they use it for many Wifi 7 models) use the MX30LF2G28AD SLC NAND flash, which can handle up to 60K erase cycles.

Should also mention that the NAND part @RMerlin mentions - this is an SLC part, which is the best that you can get for NAND - most of your SSD's now days are MLC (or more) - but they have over-provisioning and a flash controller to manage the wear...

NAND has a lot of performance advantages over NOR, but NOR has good things as well - always a tradeoff...

 

[RMerlin]

Would that be the same as 60k hard resets?

No. That would assume that each hard resets would overwrite the entire flash, which it doesn`t - your hard reset probably erases 4-5 MB out of the 64 MB available for nvram + jffs. And with wear leveling, future writes of that data will be in different memory cells within those 64 MB, so you don`t constantly wear out the same memory cells.

That means if you have 64 MB available for user storage and you write a 1 MB file over and over, you should be able to write 1 MB * 64 * 60,000 before you might start to experience nand failure. And if you add to the mix the 192 MB used by the dual firmware images, that's a pretty long life.

 

[RMerlin]

How many erase cycles can the average wifi 6 router handle ?

I don`t know, it might vary by model. I remember that some models back then used flash capable of 100K P/E cycles, but they had less flash (so, memory cells were reused more often).