This doesnt really prevent physical damage. People do this because EEPROM chips have a limited number of read write cycles and up until recently most OS/Drivers were optimized for magnetic media which has an entirely different 'wear' model (usually the motors/arms wear out or the control tracks get messed up). Some of them have optimized wear leveling, which tries to write new data to the least used physical chips so as to even out wear over the entire storage drive.
Essentially, the less you write to it, the longer it lasts. It's a big deal if you have a server constantly writing/erasing/reading data.
That's why I said the effort involved is negligible for the gain in life expectancy for your average desktop. It's pointless if you don't have a separate physical hard drive.
If you want to keep it from dying L2 treat it like a delicate electronic device, not a toaster. This is why I think people constantly break their iphones and shit. They treat them like accessories, not like electronics. When I went to 'orientation' for something they made people pay full retail price for broken gear. Makes you think twice about dropping a $10000 handheld radio >.>