Disclosed in some examples are methods, systems, devices, and machine-readable mediums that provide for techniques for scrambling and/or updating meta-data that enable an efficient internal copyback operation. In some examples, improved data distribution techniques decouple the scrambling key from a physical address to allow for copyback operations while maintaining data distribution requirements across a memory device. The controller may generate a seed value that is used by a scrambling algorithm to scramble the host-data and meta-data prior to the data being written. The seed value is then encoded and written to the page with encoded versions of the scrambled user data and meta-data—the random seed is written without scrambling the random seed.