Hard Disk Failure and Bit Torrent

[gary4gar]

I am using BitTorrent for downloading stuff from past 2years. i generally download around 30-40Gb a month. and HDD IS on 15hours a day
In this process my HDD have crashed 3 times in row. People say, excessive read/write cycles shorten its life

Is there any possibility that bittorent makes hdds die faster?



also in a possible fix, how to increase the size of disk cache in deluge?
i can't see any suck option in UI

References
http://www.tipoftheday.info/tips/6-step ... nt-damage/

[loki]

I would say it is slightly possible to shorten the life of a hdd from bittorrent, but not very likely. It also depends on the age of the drive to begin with and the quality, I know a lot of people say the brand matters, I'm not going to get into all that but, personally, I've been using the brand that most people say is the worst leading brand among them and have only had one fail and it was after like 4 years of continuous use. I currently have 2 drives in a 24/7 always on configuration, and besides that the drives get a little warm externally (slightly warmer than room temp), they seem fine. Plus the average life on any new hdd these days is somewhere around 5-10 years straight... some 10 years+ you'd most likely upgrade before you wore out the drive, unless there was a manufacturing defect in which case it's cost at least probably covered by the warranty.

As for a setting to adjust the size of the cache in deluge, I don't think there is any such option.

I did read through most of that article btw, I particularly liked the broken English. Almost can't understand what they're talking about at times.

[Izkata]

Deluge does not have a cache (or, if it does, it's absurdly small), so reads and writes to the hard disk in it are a bit crazy, and will kill your hard disk faster.

Azureus has a cache that I think is 4 MB by default, and can easily be resized. And uTorrent's I think is either 16 or 32 MB by default, and can be resized as well. With such nicely-sized caches, hard disk read/writes are greatly reduced and the disk will last longer.

Torrents read/write at random points in the file, so the moving part of the hard disk has to zip back and forth across cylinders when there are a lot of reads/writes. With a cache, it's reading from RAM, and the disk does not have to move as much.

[loki]

but uses more ram...

[Iwi]

Hence you can turn it on/off, as well as selecting its size.

[andar]

There is disk caching in 0.6 and it defaults at 2mb. Eventually we will add preferences to adjust the size of the disk cache.

[gary4gar]

Thanks, Please add a Option for Disk cache as it would prolong life of HDD.

Any milestone you have set for this feature?

[xie]

Thanks, Please add a Option for Disk cache as it would prolong life of HDD.

Any milestone you have set for this feature?

andar (a developer) just said it was in 0.6 in the post right above yours. I don't think they have a release date for 0.6 though, but you can grab nightly builds here. You might also wanna check out the Dev forum.