Originally Posted by
starchase
If this question belongs in a better sub-forum (or even none at all) please feel free to move it. My question concerns what effect if any repeating a single 5 minute mp3 file for an hour would have on the memory chip that holds the file, i.e., cause undue wear.
The equipment: Samsung Galaxy J3 (Model # SM-S367VL), 2GB RAM, 16GB Storage; the player: Muzio Player free. The mp3 file plays off of a 2GB micro SD card I installed.
I bike almost every day and play this file of a rain storm for white noise as I run through my prayer list. (If I use any regular music/song file it is too distracting for my purpose of concentrating on the prayer list.)
So for the hour and 10 minutes I'm biking does repeating the 5 minutes of this white noise file wear out any areas of the memory chip where it resides? Or should I create a play list of a bunch of white noise files that total an hour to spread the use of memory around. Or does it even matter one way or the other?
You totally run the risk of wearing a hole through the memory chip where the file is stored by playing the same file over and over.
No, seriously, a sound/music file is nothing more than a simple set of instructions or computer code which tells the computer what to do. You're not going to wear out the memory chip by playing the same file over and over. It's going to read that particular section of the chip and then play the audio. The file is nothing more than a stored set of 1's and 0's on the silicone wafer of the chip. Reading these 1's and 0's, even if it's the same file on repeat, isn't going to harm anything.
Now, it may wear out the chip if you were constantly saving data to it and erasing it, but even memory sticks don't seem to wear out over time. You'd have to do it thousands of times a day for maybe a year before you noticed any degradation. And they do say that copying sound files from one device to another device and to another device, over time might degrade the data in the file, but it's not likely it will damage the storage media where it's stored. I think through the normal lifetime and usage of your audio device you won't have any problems.