Then why do PCs let you check your SSD / HDD health and integral info through OS codes, while phones (Android based specifically) have no such commands ? Doesn’t it make more sense to include such things in phones since they hold sensitive personal data, and therefore are just as prone to data loss as PC hard drives ? (if not more, since you can’t just swap a phone’s storage unit if it starts to fail…)
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All phones are using flash memory which is generally good for about 1000 write cycles.
On a PC, its feasible to write enough to the drive to hit the lifespan. A 1 TB drive can support about 1 PB written to it and if you’re doing video editing you can get to this number. To kill a drive in 3 year you have to write 1% of its capacity per day, this is possible but hard aside from a few specific workloads
Phones have much shorter lifespans and the OS takes up a disproportionate amount of space on the drive so you can’t write to it regularly. To run into flash failure on a 256 GB phone you’d need to be writing 2.5GB/day every day for 3 years. That’s about 300 photos per day.
Because you can’t run the heavy workloads on phones and they aren’t expected to keep chugging for 10 years (the first smartphone only released 15 years ago) flash failure from wearout is pretty much a non-issue. You *might* be able to do it if you tried, but no one is going to accidentally wearout their onboard flash storage.
This is further helped by “overprovisioning” where we include 10-20% extra flash than stated to provide fresh blocks to be swapped in when some have been written to a lot. This, combined with wear leveling, gives you quite a long time before you start having a reduction in capacity or losing data. When flash hits wear out the controller will generally put it into read only mode so you can still recover your data even in this event
That said, spontaneous failure due to defects is always an option. Just because the wearout mechanism isn’t a huge concern doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be backing up your data
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