Will reading one file constantly eventally damage my hard drive? [closed]

Question

I need to open a file and call readlines() function once every second, 24 hours a day - won't it (after a while) damage my hard drive?

import time

while True:
    with open(filePath,'r') as f:
        lines = f.readlines()
    # do things with lines
    time.sleep(1)

Answer 1

Will reading one file constantly eventually damage my hard drive?

Probably not.

1. Most modern operating systems cache files and file metadata in memory. If you repeatedly read the same file, you are probably reading it from the in-memory copy. This means you should not be touching the disk¹.

2. If you were talking about an SSD or NVME device, reads do not wear out the device. The NAND flash, NVRAM (or whatever) memory technology does have a limited number of writes cycles for each location, but you are not writing, so that should not apply.

3. If you were using a hard drive on a laptop, and you had the laptop configured to spin down the drive to save power, then it is possible that you could get an excessive number of spinup / spindowns which could shorten the drive life.

   However:

   • You are more likely to get that by reading or writing lots of different files (see point 1.).
   • Your one second sleep is most likely too short for a spindown to occur, even with your laptop's most aggressive "power-save" settings.

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Having said that, if you are worried about your hard drive, there are two simple solutions:

• Put a copy of the file into a RAM file system and read it from there.
• Load the file into your application's memory (e.g. as a list of lines) and use that instead of re-reading the file.

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^{1 ... unless the OS is aggressively saving the "last access" timestamp in the file's metadata. You can typically turn that off at the OS level.}