Frequent, lengthy voice recording damaging to iPhone? Possible Duplicate:
  Apple iPhone 4 flash memory  




I have an iPhone 4S and lately I've been seeking a way to record some class lectures. Today, I decided to try out using the Voice Memos app on my iPhone and I was absolutely stunned by the quality.

However, if I use my iPhone I'll be recording 1/4GB - 1GB every weekday for the foreseeable future and I'm worried the frequent data read/write will damage my iPhone. I know that flash drives will die after 1000 read/writes, and I'm pretty sure that iPhone's memory is flash-based. I'll need to keep my phone healthy for another year.

Will frequent, intensive daily R/W kill the phone?
Not likely. Use your phone to do whatever you want to do with it.

Per iFixit's teardown there's a Toshiba MLC NAND flash chip in there. You've got at least 10,000 write cycles for the flash, which means you could fill the phone up 10,000 times before you had any problems. If you're figuring a gigabyte of recording each day, a 16GB phone gives you 40+ years of recording time.

(If somebody can find a datasheet for the part, you could confirm the potential number of write cycles. My 10,000 is an educated guess based on typical MLC.)