Method of managing the endurance of non-volatile memories

Abstract

The invention relates to a method for managing the endurance of a data storage system provided with a set of sectors endowed with a guaranteed native endurance capacity (G), comprising the steps consisting in: —partitioning said data storage system into a plurality of work sectors, and into a plurality of replacement sectors able to form an endurance reservoir, certain of the work sectors being intended to be replaced by replacement sectors when said work sectors are expended after a certain number of programming and/or erasure cycles; —defining an address management area making it possible to retrieve the location of the replacement sectors assigned to expended work sectors; —determining, sector by sector, whether a current work sector is physically expended, and executing a step of replacing this work sector by a replacement sector, only when said current work sector is declared physically expended. This method of managing endurance is in particular characterized in that in order to measure the expenditure of a sector, automatic reading of the quality of erasure of the memory points of the sector with respect to a severized reading criterion (margin Vref.) is carried out, that is to say one which is more severe than a normal criterion (Normal Vref.).