Constantly Flashing ROMs - is it bad for your DROID's health?!

[gracefulminutes]

So, I rooted my phone 3 months into getting my Droid, and I love seeing what tweaks are in many custom ROMs; LED lights, notification tweaks, proper TETHER and screen grabs w/o SDK were my reasons FWIW.

Anyhoo, I've always wondered if you could damage your phone after flashing SO MANY ROMs after a period of time (avg for me is 7/month - rotating). Of course, every phone has it's limits, but how much is TOO much? I'd thought it'd be cool to get some opinions.

 

[Brett]

i had my droid since last november so it was roughly 11 months ago and i rooted it in like january. from that time to about a few weeks ago i would flash roms multiple times a week and from my experiences, no i don't think flashing roms will reduce your droid's life or health. overclocking the cpu might but that is understandable since you are pushing it more than it was designed to do. one thing though which i do not know if this was due to rebooting into recovery so many times is that my power button broke 3 weeks ago. it is possible that it could have happened due to pressing it so much when rebooting and switching it in and out of airplane mode at work, who knows. but just something to keep in mind.

 

[gracefulminutes]

I've never overclocked my processor because I was always afraid I'd muck it up. Most ROMs I've flashed (Shadow/BB/CM) give me the option, but I never take it, mostly because I like the speed of mine how it is; it isn't broke so why fix it?

And about the power button - that's rough. That would irk the mess out of me.

 

[Brett]

It did annoy me too but now I got me an incredible for free

 

[jscheller]

I think it will wear over flashes

Dear Mr. gracefulminutes,

I am completely new to this business, but I just read a section on Wikipedia named "Flash Memory". If you go down to the sub-section named "Memory Wear" you will see what I have, which to paraphrase, is this:

Most flash memory will start to loose integrity after 100,000 P/E cycles.

I hope this is helpful, but know that I am only passing on what I have read and do not know this first hand.

 

[sniffs]

Flash memory, regardless if it's internal or secure digital(card) based has write/read life cycles.. eventually they will all be useless.

but.. you're talking millions of writes.. on average, that's about a 10 year life.

 

[Johnly]

That's why good SD cards come with ten year warranty. It depends on the quality of the chip.

 

[takeshi]

Anyhoo, I've always wondered if you could damage your phone after flashing SO MANY ROMs after a period of time (avg for me is 7/month - rotating).

Aside from using the memory's read/write cycles, no.

 

[DevynMapes]

People have been asking this one for a long time. The answer seems to be no.

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