  Recently, flash memories have become a competitive solution for mass storage.
The flash memories have rather different properties compared with the rotary
hard drives. That is, the writing of flash memories is constrained, and flash
memories can endure only limited numbers of erases. Therefore, the design goals
for the flash memory systems are quite different from these for other memory
systems. In this paper, we consider the problem of coding efficiency. We define
the "coding-efficiency" as the amount of information that one flash memory cell
can be used to record per cost. Because each flash memory cell can endure a
roughly fixed number of erases, the cost of data recording can be well-defined.
We define "payload" as the amount of information that one flash memory cell can
represent at a particular moment. By using information-theoretic arguments, we
prove a coding theorem for achievable coding rates. We prove an upper and lower
bound for coding efficiency. We show in this paper that there exists a
fundamental trade-off between "payload" and "coding efficiency". The results in
this paper may provide useful insights on the design of future flash memory
systems.
