Write cycles can be an issue with flash drives but this only applies to writes, not reads. In most cases you would only copy a game once to the drive (that's one write) and then it would only be reads when you load it up to play.
If you're using an app (on any device, not just a Wii) that constantly writes to the flash drive for some reason then you may eventually reach its limit for writes. I don't know of any Wii apps that do this (someone tell me if you know of any), and in practice it's actually pretty hard to hit the write limit with genuine brand flash drives. I believe that the vast majority of the failures people report are just from buying cheap flash drives online.
The real problem with using flash drives on the Wii is that they generally have very slow read speeds compared to hard drives or even SD cards. Games will fail to load or crash halfway through because they can't read the data fast enough. If you manage to find a flash drive with good read speeds you could probably use it without a problem. If you're only using it to load ROMs in emulators it should be fine even at slower speeds (assuming the emulator supports USB drives).
Long story short, there's virtually no reason to buy flash drives since they tend to cost more per-GB than SD and are usually much slower on top of that. You would be better off buying an SD card with a USB adapter if a hard drive is out of your budget.
If you're using an app (on any device, not just a Wii) that constantly writes to the flash drive for some reason then you may eventually reach its limit for writes. I don't know of any Wii apps that do this (someone tell me if you know of any), and in practice it's actually pretty hard to hit the write limit with genuine brand flash drives. I believe that the vast majority of the failures people report are just from buying cheap flash drives online.
The real problem with using flash drives on the Wii is that they generally have very slow read speeds compared to hard drives or even SD cards. Games will fail to load or crash halfway through because they can't read the data fast enough. If you manage to find a flash drive with good read speeds you could probably use it without a problem. If you're only using it to load ROMs in emulators it should be fine even at slower speeds (assuming the emulator supports USB drives).
Long story short, there's virtually no reason to buy flash drives since they tend to cost more per-GB than SD and are usually much slower on top of that. You would be better off buying an SD card with a USB adapter if a hard drive is out of your budget.
