Zend certified PHP/Magento developer

Can ionice reduce wear and tear on hard disks?

Without knowing how ionice works functionally, I was wondering if ionice more smartly batches disk I/O operations for more efficient physical movement (spinning disks specifically).

I run a lot of content indexing (grep, tee) and transfer (rsync) operations in cron jobs so was wondering if I could instantly make them less damaging.