Embodiments herein describe a memory system that queues program requests to a block of flash memory until a predefined threshold is reached. That is, instead of performing program requests to write data into the block as the requests are received, the memory system queues the requests until the threshold is satisfied. Once the buffer for the block includes the threshold amount of program requests, the memory system performs the stored requests. In one embodiment, the memory system erases all the pages in the block before writing the new data in the program requests into the destination pages. The data that was originally stored in the pages that are not destination pages is rewritten into the pages. In this example, the queued program requests can be written into the pages using one erase and write step rather than individual erase and write steps for each of the requests.