I heard it's not recommended because of all the writing on the drive?
(My friend wants to know)
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5 Answers
You don't download bittorrent data at SSD speeds (usually). Why not do bittorrent on the rotational media, and do low-latency / high-speed operations on the SSD? The only operation that would benefit from the SSD would be the reassembly at the end which, on the whole, is probably the smallest portion of the time required for the overall transfer.
That said, check out the lifetime of the SSD. It is probably in total number of writes per cell. As such, more writes means sooner death. If using it for bittorrent means you would use it more, yes, it will die sooner.
Note that this applies solely to receiving files via bittorrent. Sending them is another story entirely, and shouldn't affect the lifetime of the drive (since it involves only reads)
answered Jul 8, 2010 at 2:02
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Doesn't the bittorrent client write data to multiple parts of the same sparse file? Oh and for the downvote, I dunno. +1 from me though– TheLQJul 8, 2010 at 3:56
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1FYI, for SSDs, multiple writes to the same 'sector' are still wear-leveled to different parts of the SSD, so writing multiple times to the same spot shouldn't affect the lifetime adversely compared to the same number of writes in different locations. If SSD is the only drive available, and bittorrent is something you want to do, then I would say do it. It may 'use up' the drive faster, but at that point you're balancing the cost of the drive amortized over a slightly different period of time with the satisfaction cost of not having bittorrent. Jul 8, 2010 at 4:45
Hmm. Maybe.
Bitorrent has pretty heavy write requirements, and causes a lot of disk usage. On the other hand, modern SSDs do manage pretty impressive numbers of cycles before failure. I'd say it isn't going to kill it, but might reduce life somwhat
answered Jul 8, 2010 at 1:55
If you have one SSD and one spinning hard-drive, you can set (atleast in uTorrent) the client to keep uncomplete files while they are downloaded on the spinning one, and then move it to the SSD once it´s ready.... i don´t know if this will cause less wear on the SSD than writing it in chunks, does writing 1Mb 100 times use up 100 times more lifetime than writing 1 100Mb file? maybe something inbetween?
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2Hi, welcome to SuperUser.com. Check the FAQ (superuser.com/faq) for more details about the way this site works. This is not a forum, it is a place for questions to be asked and answered. If you have a new question, please post it as such, by clicking on "Ask Question" (superuser.com/questions/ask), rather than as answer to another question.– Sathyajith Bhat ♦Oct 16, 2010 at 3:27
The SSD "wears" relatively quickly when writing small files. So 100 1MB files hurt the SSDs longevity. Writing one 100MB file on the other hand doesn't hurt it at as much. Just be careful with those rar or zip files where the movie split into several smaller files.
You generally don't want to keep movie files on an SSD though; only the OS, applications, and (possibly) games.
I would not torrent to a thumb drive, because those can only handle so many read/writes. SSD's are different though. They have a much longer lifespan, much more comparable to regular hard drives, so I personally won't worry about it.
