will formatting a flash memory based pen drive (thumb drive) many times cause damage to it (or to any portion)

Question

i have read somewhere that we should not format a hard disk too often. i believe that since flash memory based drives are solid state with no moving parts, all the flip flops or the memory cell units in it are equal and all are purely solid state so i believe that no matter how many times we format a flash memory based drive, there should be no damage cause to it whatsoever

Answer 1

Flash drives have a limited number of write cycles before they start having errors. Formatting will use those up, just like any write (except formatting writes across the whole disk, so it's much worse than storing a little file).

Answer 2

There really is no reason to format a flash drive more than once. Since it is solid state, there is no reason to defrag either. Really all formating it does is the same as deleting everything on it.