Well, I think you should clarify what you mean by "causing damage to a drive or kill a hard drive from frequent use". Do you mean physical(hardware) or logical errors?

By that I mean:

Physical damage to the disk hardware is not likely. (Technically speaking, any disk activity does tiny amount of damage to the disk-head and storage-plates in the harddisk. You will need to replace your harddisk after a few years anyway.)

Depending how you define a damage to the file-system (physical?/logical?), improper use of unlink on directories will definitely damage your file-system. But I classify that as a logical error, not a hardware error. One logical error is already capable of damaging the file system, you don't even need the word 'frequent' here.

In reply to Re: unlink Question by Roger
in thread unlink Question by lisaw

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