I'm not sure who you are replying to. Your fictitious account does not match my reality.
A drive that is accessed a couple times a day seems like the perfect use case for a green. Sadly, it head parks after 8 seconds of idle time, and Linux was doing one IO every 30 seconds, I believe as part of the S.M.A.R.T. monitoring (its been a while), the drive is rated for 300000 head parks in its lifetime, so in 105 days the drive has thrashed away its specified lifetime because you were monitoring the drives' health, and head parks wasn't one of the parameters tracked, so it didn't even help to monitor!
This is not because the Green is not Black. It is not the grade of bearing, or the balance tolerance of the platters. This is because WD wrote ridiculously silly firmware for their drives and they self destructed on one of the most common computing platforms.
Back to the article topic: The similar workload machines I deployed 14 months ago have an SSD for their root drive and newer greens (tweaked to not load cycle) for their bulk. None of the SSDs have even reach 1% of their media lifetime count in their S.M.A.R.T. data. I'm not worried about wearing out SSDs.
