
MultiMediaCard Flash
Preliminary MultiMediaCard Product Manual;
1998 SANDISK CORPORATION
Page 9 of 79
incurred. MultiMediaCards do a read after write under margin conditions to verify that the
data is written correctly (except in the case of a Write without Erase Command). In the rare
case that a bit is found to be defective, MultiMediaCards replace this bad bit with a spare
bit within the sector header. If necessary, MultiMediaCards will even replace the entire
sector with a spare sector. This is completely transparent to the host and does not
consume any user data space.
The MultiMediaCards soft error rate specification is much better than the magnetic disk
drive specification. In the extremely rare case a read error does occur, MultiMediaCards
have innovative algorithms to recover the data. This is similar to using retries on a disk
drive but is much more sophisticated. The last line of defense is to employ powerful ECC
to correct the data. If ECC is used to recover data, defective bits are replaced with spare
bits to ensure they do not cause any future problems.
These defect and error management systems coupled with the solid-state construction
give MultiMediaCards unparalleled reliability.
1.5.3 Endurance
MultiMediaCard-F00XX Cards have an endurance specification for each sector of 300,000
writes (reading a logical sector is unlimited). This is far beyond what is needed in nearly all
applications of MultiMediaCards. Even very heavy use of the MultiMediaCard in cellular
phones, personal communicators, pagers and voice recorders will use only a fraction of
the total endurance over the typical device’s five year lifetime. For instance, it would take
over 34 years to wear out an area on the MultiMediaCard on which a files of any size (from
512 bytes to capacity) was rewritten 3 times per hour, 8 hours a day, 365 days per year.
With typical applications the endurance limit is not of any practical concern to the vast
majority of users.
1.5.4 Wear Leveling
MultiMediaCard-F00XX MultiMediaCards do not require or perform a Wear Level
operation.
1.5.5 Using the Erase Sector and Write without Erase Commands
The Erase Sector and Write without Erase commands provide the capability to
substantially increase the write performance of the MultiMediaCard. Once a sector has
been erased using the Erase Sector command, a write to that sector will be much faster.
This is because a normal write operation includes a separate sector erase prior to write.
1.5.5.1 Limitations and Issues
The advantage of the Write without Erase and Erase Sector commands is that they shift
the bulk of the erase and write time to the Erase Sector command. The Erase Sector
command performs most of the normal tasks needed. To increase the speed of the Write
without Erase command, the final margin verify done in a normal write command is
skipped for the first 16K writes. When the cycle count (hot count) of a sector exceeds 16K,