Take the 2-minute tour ×  If I watch movies directly off my USB
Flash Drive, will the many reads somehow cause the drive to
deteriorate faster? Or is there any other harm in doing this?
My alternative is copying the movie to my hard drive. Would that
be better?  share|improve this question  4 Answers 4  up vote 21
down vote accepted  A simple check on Wikipedia can help a lot:
The method used to read NAND flash memory can cause other cells
near the cell being read to change over time if the surrounding
cells of the block are not rewritten. This is generally in the
hundreds of thousands of reads without a rewrite of those cells.
The error does not appear when reading the original cell, but
rather shows up when finally reading one of the surrounding
cells.  So indeed reading from a flash memory will cause it to
rewrite some blocks every now and then. Writing to a flash
memory happens block wise, and every block can only be rewritten
a certain amount of times (actual number differs). But
considering that this