QOTD : BitTorrent vs Hard drives

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Socoder -> Question of the Day -> QOTD : BitTorrent vs Hard drives
Sun, 09 Mar 2008, 10:54
Jayenkai	In the past couple of years, I seem to be eating my way through hard drives pretty quickly.. Not "Download too much telly, use too much space" type eating.. The other sort. Got a new hard drive about a year ago, and right now it's struggling. Windows is going slower, things aren't going the way their meant to be, and it looks like it's time for me to get a new hard drive. Again! I'm wondering if it's BitTorrent. I do download a lot of TV shows, and it just occurred to me that whilst it's down/uploading these shows, it's jumping around the hard drive like crazy. If I constantly delete/restart a bunch of torrents, that's even more frantic crazy hopping the HD's doing, and it's all for bittorrent. What's the common census on this? Can BT kill harddrives quicker? Or am I just doing too much random stuff as it is? -=-=- ''Load, Next List!''
Sun, 09 Mar 2008, 12:11
mike_g	Have you done defrag recently? If not that should speed things up. Fragmentation results in excessive read head movement.
Sun, 09 Mar 2008, 14:27
Eikon	Yes, BT can speed up the death of a drive. I just had a 20GB and 80GB crash simultaneously. The data was retrievable on only one of them, but thankfully it was the 80 gig. There is a program called Hard Disk Sentinel you may want to look into. It can give you a drive health status in percentage, and even estimate how many days your drive has left in operation. The best tip for keeping drives healthy is to make sure you have the option enabled in power saving to turn them off after so many minutes of inactivity.
Tue, 11 Mar 2008, 04:53
HoboBen	In some clients, (or at least, the one I use, Deluge) there's an option to choose between "compact" and "full" allocation, the latter of which reduces file fragmentation, so I would guess that setting decreases hard drive wear, but as it's not enabled by default in mine maybe it's at the cost of extra CPU usage or something... \|edit\| Oh, it's even recommended: linky \|edit\| My Western Digital external drive has lasted a long time, although I think it's starting to feel the strain of things as it's quite noisy now and takes a full ten seconds to spin up when I turn it on... I'll guiltily put my hand up and admit that I defragged it for the first time in a year yesterday though. But I've found WD drives to last quite well, so maybe it's worth experimenting with a different manufacturer than your last one. -=-=- blog \| work \| code \| more code
Tue, 11 Mar 2008, 05:05
Jayenkai	I pretty much always use WD, no reason to chance anything else, really.. Defrag should be starting once month on my system, on Saturdays, whilst I'm at work. .. To be honest, I've never checked that it has... Perhaps I should! -=-=- ''Load, Next List!''
Tue, 18 Mar 2008, 16:11
dna	You are downloading too much without defragmenting your hard drive -=-=- DNA