"FWIW, Google, analyzing ""more than one hundred thousand disk drives"" in their datacenters found that there was ""very little correlation between failure rates and either elevated temperature or activity levels."" Source: Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population
I just shut off indexing and use Voidtools' Everything search. It indexes instantly and search is super fast since it just uses the NTFS MFT. If you need comprehensive, though, Google Desktop wins there."
"There's certainly some disk based overhead that can cause computers that are already bottlenecked by disk speed to really become slow. As a rule, I remove/disable all index services. My thoughts are simple, I'd rather have faster performance all the time and slower performance when I search for things as opposed to the other way around.
As to putting wear/tear on your drives. It's clear that you'll be putting more use on your equipment by allowing indexing services to operate than if you did not allow them. However, as the previous poster suggested, I doubt you'd encounter a situation where the indexing would lead to drive failure before you were ready to make an upgrade anyhow."
