2

I tend to download about 100GB stuff every month and most of it over torrent and I have been doing this for almost 2 years.
I download things to my windows drive and then move them to other locations.
I was wondering how would this affect my hard drive's health because I have read that HDDs have limited read write cycles.
Furthermore, I have observed that torrent clients write data quite randomly onto disk(by randomly I mean scattered/fragmented).
Will this affect my hard drive's health?

tumchaaditya
  • 3,752
  • 5
  • 41
  • 58

2 Answers2

10

Actually, HDDs have mean times between failure - they tend to usually die due to mechanical failure or electrical failure, and this will happen anyway, due to run time, not data transfer.

I suggest taking a look at this old closed question of interest on hard drive lifespans here - which seems to reference this paper by google - they have a graph of annualised failure rate for 5 years on page 5. It indicates, outside the first year (when the obviously defective disks die) and the 5th year (by which you may want to consider replacing the drive), utilisation has very little effect.

SSDs have limited read/write cycles, and probably arn't a good choice for torrent storage

Fragmentation can be an issue, but newer versions of windows defrag automatically, and its a performance issue rather than a lifespan issue. I believe many torrent clients have an option to preallocate the space to avoid that as well.

I personally ended up having a seperate drive for OS, transient storage and long term storage, with the transient storage drive including the long term storage drive's backups. On a longer term, i may look at building a san for this.

A safe idea is to assume any drive can fail at any time, and work accordingly, but I don't really think that downloading torrents has a greater effect than the fact that your hard drive is running or the temperatures its running under,

Community
  • 1
Journeyman Geek
  • 133,878
4

  1. Applications do not determine where they write on the disk. THat is up to Windows which uses the Master File Table ($MFT) a super hidden file on the disk that keep track of allocated blocks. So when an application such as explorer or winrar or an installer requests disk space, Windows takes care of which spaces are free from the beginning of the volume and fills them in that order. $MFT for NTFS replaced the previously used similar function with $FAT32 File ALLOCATION sp. Table.

  2. Constant thrashing of files write/install/delete/move leaves your drive extremely fragmented since each file is unlikely the same size as the ones deleted. Find a good defragger that allows maybe allows you to specify zones for big files. Otherwise just use Auslogics free defragger or SysInternals free defrag tool as a scheduled task. It is not critical to do that often as Windows is multitasking and doing random seeks anyway with registries, cache and %temp% files , but monthly may be ok if you want to see your files more contiguous. Just add a task to Schedule task point to the defragger and set a schedule.

  3. Otherwise disk drives ought to last 5 yrs non-stop trouble-free. YOur mileage may very depending on if it is dropped in an external box when running or a laptop or is running hot in a tower with other drives stacked too close and no air-flow between them.

Tony Stewart EE since 1975
  • 1,780