通过使用os.walk减少硬盘驱动器的寿命

Question

Is there any problem with running the following script on a timer over a whole external disk drive?

EXTERNAL_DRIVE_DIRECTORY = "E:\Files"
# get all of the files in a top level directory of a hard drive
def get_set_of_all_files():
    set_of_files = set()
    for root, dirs, files in os.walk(EXTERNAL_DRIVE_DIRECTORY):
        for f in files:
            # get file name without file extension
            f = os.path.splitext(f)[0]
            set_of_files.add(f)
    return set_of_episodes

The idea is to check all of the files on the hard drive against another set which has files that may or may not be in the hard drive. Therefore the script may be running at time intervals (say, every 10 minutes).

Will this be incredibly taxing on the hard drive? I have heard that disk can only read/write so many times, so it seems like this might reduce the life of the disk. Is the reduction in life you would see from this code unusually large?

Answer 1

It depends on operating system, filesystem and amount of free memory.
I can speak only for UNIX-based OSes - most of them will try to cache metadata for recently accessed files in memory on first run and most likely won't even issue a request to hard drive on subsequent runs.