Why do you think it would not happen for years? As I mentioned in a previous post there is a trade off between price memory size and failure rate so some of the

Why do you think it would not happen for years? As I mentioned in a previous post there is a trade off between price memory size and failure rate so some of the higher density memories will have much lower life than what you may be used to. And no you would not be able to read from it. When a flash cell wears off the ability to read it degrades or disappears. Depending on the memory you still may be able to recover the data using ECC or the like, but this ability tends to disappear as large numbers of cells start dying.