Quote Originally Posted by Coldfire View Post
That's not correct. There are different types of flash memory. Some are fast, some survive lots of read/write cycles and some are cheap.
It's still the write cycles that wear out the chips, not the read cycles. Files becoming unreadable over time is because the cells need refreshes from time to time, which equals writing, which wears out the chip. And I did say the speeds differ.

AFAIK most flash drives are SLC, just like cheaper SSDs, while better ones are MLC (might be wrong on this one though)