While I am aware that performing writes on a USB flash drive degrades the life expectancy of the device. I have heard the quantity of writes is anywhere from 100 thousand to 10 million, but I have not heard about number of read operations. Does reading from the device count toward this total?
I am interested in writing only once to a flash drive and setting it to read-only. Then reading files from the device a thousand or more times per day, but am wondering if (at say 1,000 reads per day), the flash drive will need to be replaced within 100 days (assuming a 100,000 r/w cycle lifetime)?
Best Answer
There is, for practical purposes, no read limit. There really isn't a write limit either, it's an erase limit. (And, if you've previously written to a block, you need to erase it to write new data to it.)