bittorrent

turbotoaster · 5 May 2006 at 17:55

never been in this section before, but thought id ask

if ya are downloading, ie for a long time, does it damage your harddrive, i heard people running prime killed there HD because prime was paging and thrashing the drive

its just looked at my HD and its at 40c which i know means its being worked

just thought id ask the question

Messiah Khan · 5 May 2006 at 19:30

As far as im concerned hardrives are there to be used. What you want to look at is the MTBF(Mean time before failure), which is the amount of hours the drive is likely to run before failing, so obviously the more you use the drive, the faster this number will come about. But even if the drive is used 24/7, your still likely to be talking years until the drive fails.

turbotoaster · 5 May 2006 at 21:21

ah ok thanks, was just thinking about it

id10T_error · 5 May 2006 at 21:30

[pedantic]
Actually MTBF stands for Mean Time Between Failure
[/pedantic]

FatRakoon · 6 May 2006 at 00:24

I use a Maxtor 40GBHD for my torrents.

I am pleased to say that I have been using various P2P Programs such as Ares, IMesh and for about a year now, I have been using torrents. My system is running 24/7 downloading 24/7 various things like Linux ISOs and docs etc, its not stopped for what? must be over 2 years now, and its rock solid.

I have the Maxtor as purely a scraps / downloads drive on its own line ( Secondary on my IDE Card ) and this means that I have absolutely no problem with any form of slowdowns at all, and to be 100% honest, I have been so impressed with those litte 40GB drives, that I have bought myself a fair few of them... Used them for various tests like RAID setups etc cos they are cheap as chips, fairly nippy, and above all very reliable... Much more reliabe than their larger counterparts that for sure.

So, to be honest, drives are designed to spin permanently for something silly like 3 years, some are not good, ( WD - I hate them ) some are brilliant ( Seagate ) but for a nice compromise, those Maxtor 40GB drives are spot on.

Like I said, I dont think much of the bigger drives, but the 40GBs are great.

SiriusB · 6 May 2006 at 14:33

Just like the rest of your components - cpu, ram etc - the hdd is designed to be punished day in day out for probably longer than you'll need it. So in short - dont worry

SiriusB

FatRakoon · 6 May 2006 at 17:19

While we do say this, we must also appreciate that the times are changing..

Components these days are nowhere near as high quality as they were only a short while back.

A good example for me, is that I have a few Pioneer DVDRW Drives.. A 105 thats still going well, a 107 thats dead, another 107 thats almost dead, a 109 thats as close to dead as can be and a 110 thats deader than a dead thing thats been dead for a while.

In terms of how much use I have been abel to get out of them, the 110 is by far the least used before it died, and the 105 is *** most used, hell I still go back to it cos it works.

As for NEC, I made a massive mistake recently, with having 2 CDRW and 2 DVDRW in my main box, of various colours, I decided to get 4xNEC DVDRW drives and give my PC a treat, cos the NEC in my No2 PC is great.

I have had those drives for only about 3 months and already 2 will no longer verify disks it burns and yet goes through the whoel process of burning to create the coasters, and the other 2 seem ok, but thats a 50% success rate and its not like I have burned much either... I just have them for the hell of it.

Quality these days with PCs is the same as with everythign else... Poor. Too much mass production also means too much corner cutting.

I would be very happy to pay £300 again as I did for my Pioneer 105 because thats burned and burned and burned perfect disks since the day I got it and I am still using it, but the other junk is just that.

I think HDs are no different.

I have found WD Drives to be the worst piles of naff rubbish ever, and the only one worth looking at is the raptors, but they cost far more than they are worth for very little speed increase.
I find seagate are possibly the best, and until recently I have not been overly impressed with seagate drive-speed, however their recent babies have been quick.... As quick as my raptor for many things.
Cannot comment on Hitachi but I am about to buy my first in years after my episode with my DeathStar it put me off them till now.

locutus12 · 6 May 2006 at 21:07

always go with Seagate

you pay more for them, but they are very very good drives, 24/7 usage of my 120gig barracuda and i havent got a single bad sector. i have now retired it to an external usb cage where it wont be used as much, i think its earned it

now using a 200 gig sata internal seagate drive and im very happy with it

SiriusB · 6 May 2006 at 22:44

locutus12 said:
always go with Seagate you pay more for them, but they are very very good drives, 24/7 usage of my 120gig barracuda and i havent got a single bad sector. i have now retired it to an external usb cage where it wont be used as much, i think its earned it now using a 200 gig sata internal seagate drive and im very happy with it

I entirely agree! My Seagate has been going for around 3 years now and not one single error, bad sector or anything. Be deffo getting one of the new .10s when theyre out!

SiriusB

FatRakoon · 6 May 2006 at 23:08

Oldest HD I have is a 10GB Seagate.

Been running rock solid for yonks, till one day, after I got a load of files from my fathers PC onto it, I dropped it from my bike at about 55MPH.

I felt somethign move in my pocket, I realised the HD had gone, and I saw it bounce down the road.

I picked it up and saw it was all banged up, and took it home anyway.

Now, I plugged it in, and found the drive was still alive, however, when I was trying to copy the files onto my system, it started to go silly and so obviously it had masses of bad sectors... After a play with FDISK, and having a look with FORMAT from a Win98 CD, I found that there were no bad sectors up until about 55%, so I just FDISKed it to 50% ( Keeping well away from the bad area ) and its been running as a C: in the wifes PC since then and she uses it every day... The drive was banged up about 3 years ago, and it was a couple of years old back then.

Says it all to me.

NightmareXX · 7 May 2006 at 00:19

I've got a really old HDD (10GB) that I'm pretty sure is either maxtor or seagate and it still works

Didn't think it would.

Acutally, TBH, I have a REALLY REALLY old HDD (500MB

) that still works. Don't use it but I know it works. I'm still amazed that it does.

How would one go about checking for bad sectors (n00bish question)?

PureAppleJuice · 7 May 2006 at 00:29

Got a 4gb Seagate from 1996, still works fine

FatRakoon · 7 May 2006 at 01:18

LOL I got a 5MB Winchester MFM Drive that still works fine with no bad sectors.

I got a few smaller SCSI Drives in my Ataris that are still rock solid... A few of them are PRE-1990 and are still in perfect working order.

The oldest IDE Drive I have was made in 1986 and its a CompaQ... The last time I used it, it worked, so I wonder if it still does?

luminous · 8 May 2006 at 13:56

If you download a lot of torrents/unzip etc the drive will quickly become defragmented and its best to keep them on non system separate drive.With all the constant activity/defragging i don`t doubt it lessens the life of the drive.
To be honest you must be prepared to lose anything you have on a hard drive at any time even with a new drive ,but with torrents being temporary you can always get them again.

FatRakoon · 8 May 2006 at 15:34

Thats so true. Plus using only one HD will make your PC slower as it has to not only access the system files all the time, its also accessing the downloads all the time, and when you also need to read / write your own usual files, the whole system will be much slower than it needs to be.

I use one HD for C:, which is usually only 7GB and the rest is used as T: for things like installation files etc, nothing else.
I use a second HD for D: which is for games and apps
I use a third HD for Media, and a fourth HD for junk and downloads... Previously, my downloads were massively fragmented, but since using BITLORD, it can assign the disk space for each file withotu having to do it bit by bit and this has cut down fragmentation a hell of a lot... Still gets fragmented but its easy to cope with.

I have a fair few HDs and its a pretty obvious thing, that if you have your data on one drive and your system on another, then the whoel PC will feel a bit quicker... Different Partitions help of course, but different drives are much better, different IDe lines better still, and different IDE controlers altogether are even better again!!! ( Shut it Fat Boy )