Bittorrent and your HD

[tim_n]

Just out of interest, I've had several HD failures - the majority of which are probably just to do with bad luck.

I recently got another seagate drive (purely by accident - I hate seagate now) and used it as a purely external bittorrent storage device.

250GB of purely legal content later (don't ask) I have a massive failure.

Could the number of read/write opperations performed by bittorrent be responsible for aging the drive?

[javalord]

I think all your usage is showing up badly manufactured drives in the first place.

For the record, my luck has been with Seagate and Maxtor, but a lot really does depend on where you get the drive, how its treated etc.

[schmunk]

Could the number of read/write opperations performed by bittorrent be responsible for aging the drive?

Yes

[5lab]

i'd expect a hdd to last 3 years regarless of use.. tbh

[dangel]

Torrents can result in a heck of a lot of disk use, particularly with certain java clients Yes, i'd expect it to take it's toll

[TheAnimus]

death like this is far more likely to be a case of bad power, bad mobo controller.

Torrent can take its toll, but nothing like a busy page file in the days of 16meg o ram been decodant, and 4meg recomended.

Myself, i'd ring seagate, my dealings with them have been most excelent in the past, they seam to care when a drive dies (unlike the folk at maxtor + WD). Seagate do very well in the reliability tests so it might be something a bit closer to home. When you say external do you mean in a USB/Firewire adaptor?

[XA04]

Even though I've heard lots of bad things about a Hitachi Deskstar (AKA Deathstar), it hasn't let me down ONCE yet. I've had it for about 2 years now.. and I use bittorrent almost 24/7.

Although I have a feeling that it may be what you just said "Could the number of read/write opperations performed by bittorrent be responsible for aging the drive?".

I'm sorry to hear about your loss of porn, but I'm sure the hdd must still be under warenty and you can get a refund and get a decent harddrive

[PanzerKnight]

i'd expect a hdd to last 3 years regarless of use.. tbh

Been running a maxtor for 5 years now as my main hd running windows. Never turn my pc off either. Has run fine all this time, but think it is on its last legs now tbh. Hopefully my new hd will last this long

[herulach]

External drive cage says it all, bet it didnt have a fan did it?

[arthurleung]

Definitely bad power supply. When I was using a mid-range 380w to power my 6 hdds one die every 45 days, now they had not die for a year.

[peterb]

I recently had cause to look at the detailed specs for a drive. The useage figures were interesting, and while the anticipated life was quoted as 300,000 hours, it went on to specify the expected number of start ups and spin down, including controlled and uncontrolled shutdowns. Of greatest interest was the fact that the life was quoted in the context of being used no more than 330 hours a month, which is about 11 hours a day. 'In use' included time spent in spin down or sleep mode. In other words, it wasn't rated for 24x7 use, which would preclude its use in a server, etc.

[Hottentot]

In my experience the biggest killer of hard drives is excess heat. The cooler you keep it the more reliable it will be. A couple of years ago when we had a real heatwave in the UK three of my hard drives failed. Since then I have ensured all my sytems have good internal cooling so hard drive temperatures are less than 45'C. Result - no hard drive failures.
In addition having plenty of memory available for your OS should reduce read/writes as more will be held in the OS memory cache.

[tim_n]

my drive was external - apart from the fact it's filled with torrents, it also has business documents on that I just can't release back to seagate.

I told customer services last time - I lost two HDs within two days and rang 'em - there was nothing they could do without me sending the HDs back to them, and they couldn't guarentee that repair was an option, and worse they couldn't guarentee that the drives wouldn't be remanufactured and resold.

So basically out the Hd comes from the enclosure, onto my dead drive pile. I shouldn't have bought such a cheap HD from aldi.

tbh, it's a shame I can't just drive to the local office, demo the dead drives to them and get them to give me a replacement :- )

After all, HP has left me with three laptops that have died because it wasn't worth picking them up for repair, why can't seagate just replace a dead drive with a new one whilst leaving the platters with me?

[BlackDwarf]

I've got 3 HDD's with torrent data on them... 1 has been going for 3 years, one 2 years, and one about 3 months.

I've checked the SMART data on all of them, and they're all still within perfectly acceptable limits for there age.

I use azureus... and tbh... drives are meant to last. At work we have some 50Mb HDD's that still work beautifully