8

Someone told me that torrent programs keep reading and writing to HDD for long periods and that will slow down the HDD and may cause damage to it.

Is that true?

2
  • 4
    My answer from superuser.com/a/414770 applies equally well here. May 31, 2012 at 11:42
  • 1
    Short answer, No. Most of the reads and writes are so small they are cached by the hard drive buffer memory.
    – Moab
    May 31, 2012 at 20:19

4 Answers 4

10

The hard disks (even SDD) have mechanical parts or are subject to wearing. The more you use your hard disk from a user perspective, the more you use the hard disk physical parts. So using a BitTorrent client is using your disk. But you don't say you are damaging your car engine because you are driving it, so you don't damage your hard disk either.

The traditional rotational hard disk have different health parameters (that you can monitor via SMART). The main one that you can monitor are:

  • Load cycle count: laptop hard disks have a much higher rate than desktop ones due to the more likelihood that they will enter energy save mode.
  • Power-on hours: hard disks have a "life expectancy" expressed in power-on hours. Much like human life expectancy, some die young while others die older; it is an average value. So by leaving your hard disk on, you are consuming its life time.
  • Reallocated Sector Count: When a sector gets faulty, HDD drives to avoid them after. They "move" the data (when they can still read the data thanks to error correction algorithm) somewhere else. I have a really old drive which has an increasing rate of this parameter, so I know one day it will fails, but it is still working!
  • the list is far from complete, but that should give you a good start.

Those two first health parameters can increase by just having your computer turned on with no service running! When a disk is close to breakdown, some other parameters should be monitored. Those are mainly related to fault in reading or writing to the disk. Check the SMART article on Wikipedia.

11
  • 1
    SSDs have no mechanical parts. They are subject to wear though.
    – devius
    May 31, 2012 at 11:17
  • @devius that's why I said mechanical parts or are subjects to wearing. :)
    – Huygens
    May 31, 2012 at 11:23
  • 1
    @devius - SSD are not "subject" to wear they a design limitation in that you can only write data to a certain cell X number of times. This limit is slowly being increased.
    – Ramhound
    May 31, 2012 at 11:32
  • @Ramhound my English is perhaps not good enough to understand the subtle differences of meaning between "subject to wear" and "design limitation" in this context. But anyway what I was saying was that rotational HDD have mechanical parts and SDD have potential issues with writes wearing.
    – Huygens
    May 31, 2012 at 11:44
  • +1 for "your are damaging your car engine because your are driving it" Very clever example ^_^ May 31, 2012 at 11:56
1

It's true, but senseless.

It's similar to this kind of argument: "By driving your car to the grocery store, you risk getting into an accident that could destroy your car."

Yes, it's true. But what's the point of having a car if you're so afraid of damaging it that you don't even use it for normal activities that you want to do?

0

True. It's like a CD-ROM; if you work it 24x7, it's going to reduce the lifespan, mostly damage its motor. So the trick is to only download one file at a time, and don't seed. So it's likely to total UP DOWN only 1. For your information, I use green HDD, which I've already bought four times.

1
  • 3
    This does not really answer the question. I am not sure the difference between 3 files or 1 files when it comes to writing data
    – Ramhound
    Mar 18, 2014 at 2:43
0

It depends on the drive type, HDD or SSD.

In the traditional way, the user only establishes a connection with the server and downloads the file from the server, so you only write the file to the hard disk once, and there is no read operation. With bittorrent, users do not download files directly from the server (tracker), but query the tracker for the IP addresses of users who own the same file. That is, tracker knows who have the specific part of the file. For example, tracker knows the first quarter belong to A, the second quater belong to B,etc. And then you download the first quarter from A and the second quarter form B, etc. "tit for tat." At the same time, while downloading these parts of the file, you also inform the tracker that you now own these parts of the file, and other users who want to download the file will also get your ip address from the tracker and download the parts you own, maybe you provide data to 4 users at the same time, which means that 4 users read your hard disk at the same time. When your file is downloaded, if you are very selfless and choose to stay in the download network, you will still be listed in the node list of the tracker, other users who want to download the file will download the file from you and read your hard disk.

In short, downloading with bittorrent only writes the file to the hard drive once but reads it many times. But whether bittorrent damage your drive depends on the drive you used.

For hard disk drives (HDD), "The primary source of wear in hard drives comes from moving the head back and forth, spinning the disk up", reading and writing hurts the hard disk equally, so using bittorrent is more harmful than downloading directly from the server. But according to google research, there is "little correlation between disk read/write bandwidth and failure rates". So you don't have to worry too much about shortening your hard drive lifespan with bittorrent.

For a solid state drive (SSD), "read operation doesn't affect lifespan", so it doesn't cause more damage than downloading directly from the server.

references: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/agcrzv/does_reading_from_hard_drives_cause_as_much_wear/

https://storagemojo.com/2007/02/19/googles-disk-failure-experience/

https://www.quora.com/Does-too-much-reading-writing-to-an-SSD-shorten-its-life

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .