Temperature grade and where it lives
The 8-SOIC footprint is a common one — same land pattern as a 24Cxx EEPROM or a small SPI SRAM — so a board layout already using that pad can swap this in without a respin.
Page program takes 8 µs, and a full-page erase-and-write cycle runs 4 ms. That's fast enough for over-the-air firmware updates on a battery-powered sensor node where the radio stays on for a limited window. If your application does frequent small writes — logging telemetry every few seconds — the 8 µs page write keeps the bus free for other SPI slaves.
