Will reading data cause SSD's to wear out?

Doesn't affect the device. The limited write lifetime of Flash is a natural consequence of how they work.

Data on Flash drives is safe because the bits are stored by electrons locked in a very well isolated layer. These electrons, if present, produce an electric field that can be picked up by a nearby transistor. Since they're locked up, reading out the transistor doesn't affect the electrons. During writes, however, to get the electrons through that layer Flash needs very high voltages. These high voltages cause some damage to the isolation layer, which accrues.

In comparison, DRAM doesn't have such an isolation layer. The electrons move quite easily. As a result, DRAM is faster and doesn't break down from writes, but the leaked electrons frequently need to be replaced. Turn off the power and they're all gone in milliseconds.


I don't believe the read process affects the NAND cells although I could be wrong (for example, look towards the bottom of this article). It may be that if a "page" or eraseblock is not reprogrammed in a very long time there is a (probably very small) likelihood some of the bits will revert to an unprogrammed state. Not sure if firmware takes this into account and rewrites/remaps pages that haven't been read in a long time.


The reliability section of this table does not mention it, so I assume reads do not affect the drive.


Flash memory is just an eeprom (a chip that can be reprogrammed. It is the reprogramming that causes wear, reads are unlimited. For reading its just memory. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory#NAND_flash this article talks a bit about how the reprogramming works, and how it basically 'burns' the data into memory.