Ext4 filesystem hits Android, no need to fear data loss (ars technica)

Posted Dec 29, 2010 20:16 UTC (Wed) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link]

atime updates are writes (even though the app only does a read). The comment I was replying to seemed to suggest that pure reads wear out flash. ie. if I mounted a volume read-only, that I could shorten its life dramatically by reading it regularly.

While I'm sure there's some impact to reading a flash cell, I've got to believe it's a few orders of magnitude smaller than the effect due to writes, and therefore generally ignorable.