I have multiple 5tb external disks attached to my main tower that (among other things) serves up Plex content. I switch each one out every year, for equivalent of about a hundred dollars each. I try and find a compromise between the amount of read requests and availability for these disks, but in the end, if they're read often enough, they die soon enough.
What killed the last one was an experiment with installing Emby. Like many similar systems, it bewilderingly has no rate-limiting function, and will thrash a disk to within an inch of its life in order to index it. And that was the most recent thing that killed one of my external Plex drives, with multiple series and movies on it.
So yes, just keep refreshing the media, at reasonable intervals.
PS Yes, I know this is a poor method of content storage. NAS is looming up for me one of these days.
What killed the last one was an experiment with installing Emby. Like many similar systems, it bewilderingly has no rate-limiting function, and will thrash a disk to within an inch of its life in order to index it. And that was the most recent thing that killed one of my external Plex drives, with multiple series and movies on it.
So yes, just keep refreshing the media, at reasonable intervals.
PS Yes, I know this is a poor method of content storage. NAS is looming up for me one of these days.