ESP32 Forum

Hi. During mass production in factory, when flashing the firmware it seems the idea is to always erase the flash before writing data to it. But erasing is quite time consuming. On brand new ESP32-S3-WROOM-1 modules, I have noticed the flash content is initially just 0xff everywhere, except the first 32 bytes that contain a repeating pattern of "5a 00 ff a5". Except for the first sector, and maybe after verifying that that every other sector only contain 0xff bytes, can we assume that these are already fully erased (i.e. in a good state), so that we can skip the erasing part and write directly? That would speed up the production time.

I'm not sure if we guarantee anything about the contents of the flash off-factory... you could inquire at sales@espressif.com. It could be even faster to buy pre-programmed ESP32 modules; the same email address can also help with that.