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Hello everybody. I recently got to thinking about the data retention of the flash memory used in the original xbox. I purchased an original xbox not to long ago that was basically a coma console in that it would have a green light, but no audio or video. Turns out the bios was corrupted or something similar and that it would boot with extreme difficulties after pressing the eject button a bunch of times until the drive ejected. Basically these symptoms. I did manage to flash a custom bios onto the system and that solved the booting issues it was having, but that then leads me to what I have as a discussion today. Looking at the datasheet for the Winbond W49F020 series of flash memory used in my console, I notice that it has a data retention of 20 years. This means that it should hold the data for about 20 years no problem, but it seems like mine started having issues early. By what I can tell, to refresh this data and basically restart the countdown, I need to reflash the bios to the chip rewriting the data. This brings it back to a state where the data is properly stored and is ready to last another 15-20 years. My only concern about the whole thing is that flashing a new bios can go wrong and cause the console not to boot without a mod chip. My question to someone more knowledgeable than me in this topic is, are we going to see more and more stock consoles fail to boot due to corrupt bioses in the up and coming years? I know that 1.0 and 1.1 consoles already have some issues with their 1mb flash chips, but will all sorts of version have issues? ie, 1.0 - 1.6? Is this just a limitation of anything using flash memory in a component used to boot up? I know nothing lasts forever, but I do try to make it last as long as I can. Thanks for taking the time to read through this and I hope it can spark some good discussion on the topic. Also if anything I have here is incorrect, please let me know as I am still learning about hardware in general, and I try my best to be accurate in my information. DobaMuffin