I find myself in disagreement with the idea that read/write cycles for (rotating) hard disks are unlimited. While it may be much higher, and a 'per block' char

I find myself in disagreement with the idea that read/write cycles for (rotating) hard disks are unlimited. While it may be much higher, and a 'per block' characterization is largely improper -- the thing that fails is not the block itself but the moving parts -- when I worked in a job where we had tons of cheap consumer-grade hard disks, they did seem to fail after a few hundred complete passes over the disk.