Flash and small modifications

But overall I think that we are talking basically the same thing.

I first ran into this sort of concept many years ago when the digital recording first hit the consumer market (if you can remember when the first music Christmas cards and similar appeared, that timeframe). The way those recorders worked was that they used a EEPROM chip and recorded an analog value (~8 bits worth) in each bit of the EEPROM by hitting it with a smaller than spec programming charge repeatedly until the stored value matched the desired analog value. When doing this program you would 'program' the chip with 00000001 until the first bit got to the desired value, then program it with 00000010 until the second bit got to the desired value, etc. you would never be sending a programming signal to a bit that you already had set.

multi-level flash uses a similar trick to store 4 levels of signal per cell, it calls these '00' '01' '10' '11' in the digital world, so the 'partial modification' that I am talking about would require support from the flash chipset to allow it to not try to reprogram a cell that's already been set, but that is a pretty trivial thing to do.