With HDDs, it's also mechanical wear and increased chance of a failure. SSDs are not fully immune to increased load either.

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ssl-3 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Is there any evidence that suggests that reading from a hard drive (instead of it just spinning idle) increases physical wear in any meaningful way? Likewise, is there any evidence of this for solid-state storage?

	▲	rcxdude 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yes. Hard drives have published "Annualized Workload Rate" ratings, which are in TB/year, and the manufacturers state there is no difference between reads and writes for the purpose of this rating. (https://www.toshiba-storage.com/trends-technology/mttf-what-...) For SSDs, writes matter a lot more. Reads may increase the temperature of the drive, so they'll have some effect, but I don't think I've seen a read endurance rating for an SSD.
	▲	digiown an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Reading from it requires the read head to move, as opposed to spinning idle where the heads are parked on the side. Moving parts generally wear out over time.