If you are a bit torrent junkie who satisfies his daily dose of movies, serials, software, etc... There is a very good chance that you might have heard of Bit Torrent wearing your HDDs. So, all that you have read on net, is it just crap or there is some truth behind it??
Well using Bit Torrent does speed up the wear of your HDD’s but its not going to kill it in a few months. There are people who will swear by the fact that HDD are meant to store data and this is what they do, so BT is nothing to be worried about. Let’s not argue about whether it does that or not (will come to that latter), rather lets discuss about how to save your HDD from BT burnout.
HDD Temps
Running those PC’s all night long with BT maxing out your connection does take a toll on your HDD. With constant read and write over a long period of time the HDDs tend to heat up (you might have noticed that same with LAN transfers). It does lead to decline in the HDD life (however small it maybe). So how to protect it?? Try not to download for long period of time, but if you cant do without it make sure that you attach a fan to your HDD and there is ample space for the Hot air from HDD to move out of the cabinet.
Dedicated BT drive
Try and not to download through BT to your main HDD which contains all your movies and documents. If you have that old 8 giger lying around make that a dedicated BT drive and use it for downloading. It does hurt to loose 100 of GBs of data.
Larger Cache Space
We are going to tackle frequent writes to HDD by increasing the limit that our torrent client uses to cache files before writing.
BT Clients Cache Limit ( The best way to tackle the problem)
In utorrent go to Preferences -> advanced -> Disk cache and change the size. Personally I use 35mb because I have a fast connection so it takes max 5 minutes to reach that amount and its short enough that I don’t loose too much data if utorrent crashes.
Edit : Azureus can do the same and you can also view the read-writes saved due to cache and set an optimal limit for yourself
Note : Remember not to set the cache value too high , you will loose any data in cache if utorrent crashes.
[BREAK=Cont....]
RAM
When I made my old trusty computer be my downloading rig I could see the HDD light flutter for long times, it had 256mb ram. After I upgraded to 1 GB the lighting up of HDD led was less frequent. Yes I know there are like 100 of factors to this point but increasing RAM does help.
Btw higher speed connections ( read 2Mbps and above ) magnify the effect as compared to our standard Indian speeds of 256Kbps.
Now before I finish up the article let me cover both the views.
HDD Failure and Bit Torrent are not related!! (Crap I wasted my time reading this article)
Bit Torrent does affect HDDs... Why?
Bit Torrent was made in such a way that files could be distributed faster among the users, for that files were divided into tiny little pieces. Now when the cache limit is low these piece downloads generate a lot of reads and writes to the HDD. If you don’t believe me set the cache limit to 0 Mb and see the magic.
When the HDDs run for long hours at go and generate as much heat in your cabinet ( thanx to Bit Torrent) it does take your toll on HDD. You can also validate this point just run the computer with normal usage and note the temps (Avg it over 5 hours) now do the same with Bit Torrent running.
Link to HDD reliability and Temps : Hard Disk Drives | Library | Hitachi's Drive Temperature Indicator Processor (Drive-TIP)
Your criticism and comments are welcomed ( so are ur reps
).
Well using Bit Torrent does speed up the wear of your HDD’s but its not going to kill it in a few months. There are people who will swear by the fact that HDD are meant to store data and this is what they do, so BT is nothing to be worried about. Let’s not argue about whether it does that or not (will come to that latter), rather lets discuss about how to save your HDD from BT burnout.
HDD Temps
Running those PC’s all night long with BT maxing out your connection does take a toll on your HDD. With constant read and write over a long period of time the HDDs tend to heat up (you might have noticed that same with LAN transfers). It does lead to decline in the HDD life (however small it maybe). So how to protect it?? Try not to download for long period of time, but if you cant do without it make sure that you attach a fan to your HDD and there is ample space for the Hot air from HDD to move out of the cabinet.
Dedicated BT drive
Try and not to download through BT to your main HDD which contains all your movies and documents. If you have that old 8 giger lying around make that a dedicated BT drive and use it for downloading. It does hurt to loose 100 of GBs of data.
Larger Cache Space
We are going to tackle frequent writes to HDD by increasing the limit that our torrent client uses to cache files before writing.
BT Clients Cache Limit ( The best way to tackle the problem)
In utorrent go to Preferences -> advanced -> Disk cache and change the size. Personally I use 35mb because I have a fast connection so it takes max 5 minutes to reach that amount and its short enough that I don’t loose too much data if utorrent crashes.
Edit : Azureus can do the same and you can also view the read-writes saved due to cache and set an optimal limit for yourself
Note : Remember not to set the cache value too high , you will loose any data in cache if utorrent crashes.
[BREAK=Cont....]
RAM
When I made my old trusty computer be my downloading rig I could see the HDD light flutter for long times, it had 256mb ram. After I upgraded to 1 GB the lighting up of HDD led was less frequent. Yes I know there are like 100 of factors to this point but increasing RAM does help.
Btw higher speed connections ( read 2Mbps and above ) magnify the effect as compared to our standard Indian speeds of 256Kbps.
Now before I finish up the article let me cover both the views.
HDD Failure and Bit Torrent are not related!! (Crap I wasted my time reading this article)
- HDD’s are meant to store, read and write data and this is what they are doing.
- Those 10k RPM network drives don’t fail so why will my 7.2k RPM drive will.
- Bit Torrent is like any other software it reads and writes data.
Bit Torrent does affect HDDs... Why?
Bit Torrent was made in such a way that files could be distributed faster among the users, for that files were divided into tiny little pieces. Now when the cache limit is low these piece downloads generate a lot of reads and writes to the HDD. If you don’t believe me set the cache limit to 0 Mb and see the magic.
When the HDDs run for long hours at go and generate as much heat in your cabinet ( thanx to Bit Torrent) it does take your toll on HDD. You can also validate this point just run the computer with normal usage and note the temps (Avg it over 5 hours) now do the same with Bit Torrent running.
Link to HDD reliability and Temps : Hard Disk Drives | Library | Hitachi's Drive Temperature Indicator Processor (Drive-TIP)
Your criticism and comments are welcomed ( so are ur reps
).