effect of torrents on hard disks....

Prongs298

Prongs298

In the zone
i am speaking from personal experiences, that the daily use of utorrent to download torrents has a very bad effect on hard disks. the constant reads and writes. i think there is a limit. and due to torrents that gets closer. now i have got 3 dead hdds (10 year old 40GB seagate, 7 year old 80GB western digital, 4 year old 1TB western digital). THEY ALL DIED AT DIFFERENT TIMES. 6 MONTHS APART MAYBE. and the most recent one to be following them is a seagate 500GB one which is 5 years old. i also have a 2TB wd one which is the other one working alongwith my 500GB one.

the thing is out of all those the one which has seen least use of utorrent is still active. which is the 500GB one. but the ones which were used extensively are dead, vis a vis, 40, 80, 1000 GB ones.

the thing is after my motherboard died (ASUS a8n vm. A64 3000+, dinosaur), i have been using my laptop to download torrents. and that my friends. seems to have started a series of never ending lags after every 30 seconds or so. and after much troubleshooting. the culprit seems to be my 640GB toshiba hdd. and it only gave trouble after extensive use of torrents. i mean i downloaded over 100GBs in a week.

what i need from you ladies and gentlemen is an opinion on this and also personal experiences of this kind, if god forbid, there were any?

thank you.
 
D

dikart4

Broken In
I haven't had any such problems.....I was regularly downloading 60-70 GB media per month through torrents for the past 6 years onto my 160 GB Seagate HDD till I upgraded my system 2 months ago and bought a 1 tb wd blue hdd.
 
meetdilip

meetdilip

Computer Addict
Not sure what to say. Not much of a downloader but never heard heavy downloads will corrupt hard discs.
 
R

relief

Right off the assembly line
i'm a regular downloader but i have never heard such .... but i will discuss with my friends later
 
sling-shot

sling-shot

Wise Old Owl
I prefer uTorrent for one good option it has. It allows you to make full use of RAM to reduce disk access. Please go through all the settings and set it up so that it will use the maximum amount of RAM possible and reduce disk access as much as possible.
I use at least 1 GB for this purpose. However please note that I run my torrents only when I am not using the computer.
 
kARTechnology

kARTechnology

Sony " VA" "IO"
Same here...
My os drive( which I use for downloading) has been rma'ed more than 4 times through warranty in 2 years

So I decided to attach a old 80gb ide drive to old pc and use it as downloading Box
 
harshilsharma63

harshilsharma63

DIY FTW!
I don't think there will be continuous disk writes and data is first written into buffer and on lack of space is flushed onto hard disk. This explanation is not satisfying.
 
Hrishi

Hrishi

******************
There's a thing called "DISK CACHE" , which'll reduce the number of r/w and reduce the chances of failure.
 
TheHumanBot

TheHumanBot

Padawan
i would call it just you no one has posted this type of topic before.
as your HDD are getting corrupt might be something up with your machine and you can't just blame it on utorrent.
not torrent downloader but i think developer should have thought about this before developing such software.

it would be interesting if someone post this on their support forum.
 
Hrishi

Hrishi

******************
effect_of_hdd.PNG
Gollum said:
how do you go about changing that? Any specific values ?
Click to expand...

Check the attached image for Utorrent.
 
Chaitanya

Chaitanya

Cyborg Agent
Unless you got a SSD there is no problem with downloading

Also mech HDD fail a lot faster than reported...

there shouldn't be great trouble with it(think of drives on server level they deal with 100 times data as compared to a normal PC still they last for 4-5yrs)...
If you are still doubtful get something like a NAS drive.

(Like WD red)
 
Zangetsu

Zangetsu

I am the master of my Fate.
Prongs298 said:
what i need from you ladies and gentlemen is an opinion on this and also personal experiences of this kind, if god forbid, there were any?
Click to expand...
how can u be so sure that all HDD failures were caused due to utorrent.

u can also post this case in utorrent forums and check what responses u get from people there.

Never heard utorrent damaging the HDD :-?
and from TDF there are many utorrent users which will answer this.
 
Gollum

Gollum

Collector
Zangetsu said:
how can u be so sure that all HDD failures were caused due to utorrent.

u can also post this case in utorrent forums and check what responses u get from people there.

Never heard utorrent damaging the HDD :-?
and from TDF there are many utorrent users which will answer this.
Click to expand...

yeah, torrnets read very little data off the hdd nd writes the same when it comes to d/l at low speeds. compare 30mbps to 200kbps
 
Zangetsu

Zangetsu

I am the master of my Fate.
Harddrives are mechanical devices and will eventually fail...but nobody can tell how much a particular HDD lasts..some lasts for weeks or months & some go longer for 10yrs may be...

Practically keeping a HDD cool helps run it longer.
 
shreeux

shreeux

Movie Buff
Prongs298 said:
i am speaking from personal experiences, that the daily use of utorrent to download torrents has a very bad effect on hard disks. the constant reads and writes. i think there is a limit. and due to torrents that gets closer. now i have got 3 dead hdds (10 year old 40GB seagate, 7 year old 80GB western digital, 4 year old 1TB western digital). THEY ALL DIED AT DIFFERENT TIMES. 6 MONTHS APART MAYBE. and the most recent one to be following them is a seagate 500GB one which is 5 years old. i also have a 2TB wd one which is the other one working alongwith my 500GB one.

the thing is out of all those the one which has seen least use of utorrent is still active. which is the 500GB one. but the ones which were used extensively are dead, vis a vis, 40, 80, 1000 GB ones.

the thing is after my motherboard died (ASUS a8n vm. A64 3000+, dinosaur), i have been using my laptop to download torrents. and that my friends. seems to have started a series of never ending lags after every 30 seconds or so. and after much troubleshooting. the culprit seems to be my 640GB toshiba hdd. and it only gave trouble after extensive use of torrents. i mean i downloaded over 100GBs in a week.

what i need from you ladies and gentlemen is an opinion on this and also personal experiences of this kind, if god forbid, there were any?

thank you.
Click to expand...

HI
Don't Blame Utorrent !!!
You have to regularly check disk errors and do Defragmentation, while deleting file secure method.
In my opinion IDE HD more life span than SATA HD.
 
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