RomRaider

I read on NASIOC once that someone was saying that the stock ECU's can only take a certain amount of re-flashes.

Is this true, does anyone know if too much reflashing will kill your ECU?

I have done about 30-40 so far.

i call bs on that theory
some of my ecus been flashed over 200 times over a good few years and they still work 100 percent without even a speed degradation

Somewhere around 400 flashes here and a new turbo on the way... so a few more flashes to come.

I have 150+ flashes. I have yet to hear, or have someone prove, that a limit exists. More often, you will brick an ECU, before anything. That would be due to an improper or partial reflash.
I am not sure if Colby has mentioned anything, but I know it was discussed in Openecu.org, awhile back.

That's been asked before.
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=5904
See the last post.

cheers, i thought that was BS.

At about 60 reflashes so far, no issues here (tactrix cable connector broke though, right after I flashed (or during flash) ... luckily, I didn't brick the ECU. Tactrix replaced it for free ... but I bought another one for back up ... keep 2 cables on hand!

I have 30 E85 flashes alone (not counting my 100 oct maps for winter driving )

technically, there's a limit of how many times ROM can be written to before it physically starts to "fail", but i've flashed over 400 times and still going strong.

There is only a technical limit in terms of it being actual hardware and cannot surpass the test of time. Otherwise, from a programming point of view, you can reflash ROM memory as many times as you want. Hardware will evetually die -- just as your car, computer, your dog, and even you will ...

you're correct in the sense that things wear out and die, but memory wear is not a test of time. instead, it's a test of erase/write cycles; the more you write to it, the shorter it will "live". here's an excerpt from a document regarding EEPROM wear:

"Over the cell’s “application time,” as measured by E/W cycles, the EEPROM cell begins to wear out due to the field stress. The EEPROM cell wears out as the number of cycles increase resulting in the voltage margin between the ERASE and WRITE states decreasing until finally there is not enough margin for the EEPROM sense amp to detect a difference in the two states during a READ. Failure is defined as when the sense amp can no longer reliably differentiate logic state changes."

source for above: http://ecee.colorado.edu/~mcclurel/man537.pdf

some sources say the limit is 10K write cycles, some 100K, others 1M and beyond. it depends on the chip and memory technology. a datasheet of the particular memory chip will show how many write cycles it is rated at. whatever the scenario might be, you're not likely to reach the limit of flashing your car's ECU.

Fair enough. But if you have 400 flashes so far, then I definitly ain't worry about it (on my 60 or so in 1.5 years). Let us know if it breaks

I have flashed my 02wrx and 06sti well over 1,000 times each.....