Max writes on c-touch

[muppets]

I know that there is a max number of writes to a c-touch listed somewhere in a document - but is there a location that tells me how many writes a c-touch has actually received?

[ashleigh]

Actually received... as in times firmware updated. No.

The old C-Touch Mk 1 had an endurance of 1000 erase/write cycles, that is to say, you can update the firmware 1000 times. This is guaranteed by the chip maker, meaning that in practice (so they don't get a bunch of returns) you will get a lot more than that.

Sometime during the production lifetime of the CTouch Mk1 that was increased to 10,000 erase/write cycles. This is probably about 5 years ago.

C-Touch Mk2 (the one currently available, the Mk1 being discontinued) has an endurance of over 1 million cycles.

To put this in context: If you had a CTouch Mk1 and you updated it once every working day of the year (220 times) then it would last a least 4.5 years, and most likely significant more than that.

In practice, thats not going to happen. A CTouch Mk1 might normally be updated, at most, a couple of hundred times during a 10 to 15 year installed life. (That case is equivalent to doing an update roughly once a fortnight, every fortnight, for the 10 - 15 year period.)