HDD usually don't have a limited number of writes like SSD do, if they are robust, maybe enterprise units, they can last a long time.
In a home environment some prefer using slower (5400 vs 7200), non-enterprise hard drives, maybe fewer drives with higher capacity, to reduce noise, power consumption and improve cooling (in enterprise settings this stuff is standardized and they don't care about noise, in my custom pc I might have forgotten to use the vibration dampeners or I mounted the disks vertically..every white box is different).
Also there are big differences between different models and makers. If they're cheap enough those helium filled enterprise drives can be one of the best options!
Oh sorry, can't think of an easy solution then. I've seen that audiobookshelf can find metadata for you, that could be doable. They also support ebooks but if I understood correctly from their docs they don't get synced to the audio position, just to themselves.
A promising but still in beta software is Storyteller, under very active development here. It works by creating a 'rich' epub that contains the audio synced line by line, which you can then read/listen to with just one app.
There's also older software with a similar approach like syncabook but at a glance it seems less usable than Storyteller.