Jump to content

Hard Drive failures and CRC errors while using uTorrent


Anubis2007

Recommended Posts

Hello All,

For a long time now, I have been using uTorrent as my preferred bitclient. But I am getting concerned that the program is killing my hard drives.

A few months ago now, I had three (new) hard drives completly fail to the point of any data being unrecoverable from them and it appears to be as a result of using the drives as download locations for utorrent.

This also appears more occurant when sharing. I'm very happy to share the torrents I download and have in the past shared for over 1000 hours but I'm reluctant to now for fear of the drive dying.

Just the last few days, the current download drive is now reporting the same behavior, uTorrent stopping the seeding of a file due to a CRC error.

I would like to know if anyone else has had this problem?

I would prefer to keep uTorrent as I'm happy with the functionality but I'm concerned for the hard drives safety.

Cheers all, and thanks in advance for any comments.

Happy sharing.

Anubis.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

I have experienced a similar problem, first some of my downloads showed CRC errors and when I try to fix it (right mouseclick on the torrent), the harddrive was getting overloaded and no other application was running.

I had to reset the Computer with the result that the harddrive is unbootable now.

Might there be a problem with the CRC error fix of uTorrent?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hello smilediver,

This certainly appears to be the same issue. I've had the same result on 4 drives now, 3 of which are dead beyond repair and the 4th is almost gone. Each of the drives I have used are Seagate of varying sizes, 500Gb, 400Gb, 200Gb and now down to 80Gb's...

uTorrent is the only program reading/writing on these drives so I can find no other explanation for it. Is it possible that the method of read-caching and/or writing has effects on the drive which are deterimental to the longevity of the drive?

I know that it is harddrive that reports the failed sectors, but to have so many drives do this action while just using the one program directs me to ask questions.

Please don't get me wrong, I'm not picking on uTorrent, I like the program, I'm just asking the question so that if there is a problem that it can be investigated and fixed for all our benefits.

For reference though, this does appear to be more occurant when sharing the torrent back out... If that helps.

Thanks

Anubis.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 7 months later...

I have 2x120GB and 1X300GB (all Samsung, ever since a bad experience with Seagate years ago)... On literally 24X7 downloading/seeding... 4 years now since I got into torrenting... No issues with hard drive failures yet. As someone said, the make/model/temperature etc. are all factors to be considered, esp. since uTorrent (or any P2P program for that matter) will certainly be stressing your HDDs, what with the constant sequential/random reads/writes etc.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 year later...

Sorry to revive this old thread, but yeah, I've been having the same problem. It took me a good week of troubleshooting to trace the problem back to uTorrent, but now that I have, there's no doubt in my mind that uTorrent caused the bad sectors that appeared on the disc. Whether this problem is specific to uTorrent, or whether it's just that heavy BT usage in general is rough on hard disks, I don't know, but there's definitely a correlation there.

There are a few more details about my experience in this thread:

http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=429981#p429981

I'll add that, unlike you, I haven't been getting any CRC errors from files that I've already downloaded and am just seeding; only from torrents that I'm in the process of downloading (especially large ones, in the 3+ GB range).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 4 weeks later...
  • 10 months later...

I bought a WD 500 GB hard drive for my laptop 8 months back. The hard drive was working fine until I started using utorrent. Initially it was a very little jerk/noise and I used to ignore that but it suddenly grew with the passage of time. I began to suspect utorrent for this. And I was quite successful in isolating the program as solely responsible for the issue. As of the moment i am writing this, my hard drive is almost on the verge of failure. BIOS startup doesn't straight away boot rahter it gives me messages for imminent failure. I have to ignore that to use my hard drive, what ever of it is left at the moment. And am sure like anything the next moment, i start utorrent, my hard drive will be gone. (By the way even in this fragile condition its working as charm, because am not running utorrent at the moment)

If so many users are going through this, why doesn't the utorrent team come up with some solution. The irony of the fact is that I have lost the warranty card, and now I will have to buy the new one. And all this has happened to me because of utorrent.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You can RMA a Western Digital drive without a warranty card if you do it in the 1st year.

uTorrent, like practically ANY BitTorrent client, randomly downloads and uploads pieces of torrents...it is these random reads and writes which brutally force the hdd's read/write heads to quickly move back-and-forth. A good hdd should be able to tolerate such just fine, although I guess it becomes a bigger issue at >>1 MB/sec speeds.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You can RMA a Western Digital drive without a warranty card if you do it in the 1st year.

uTorrent, like practically ANY BitTorrent client, randomly downloads and uploads pieces of torrents...it is these random reads and writes which brutally force the hdd's read/write heads to quickly move back-and-forth. A good hdd should be able to tolerate such just fine, although I guess it becomes a bigger issue at >>1 MB/sec speeds.

The issue became more apparent once dealing with HD content. I don't have proof to claim the utorrent did this, but at the moment its the way it seems. Thanks for the support anyways.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm a hardware technician and I see things like this every day. Hard drives just don't last the same way they used to. Hard drive manufacturers have even reduced the amount of warranty you used to get on hard drives. If you get 3 years out of a hard drive your doing extremely well. The simple fact is sata is cheap and cheerful and you will see very soon that manufacturers will drop their warranties to 1 year on them some already have on OEM. If you want a drive that will last you really need to invest in SAS as they fail much less although cost much more. SSD drives appear to be the new thing but they also can only make so many read / writes before they start failing. Torrents can make thousands of such read / writes per hour and a 24 hour session of downloading at fast rates really push the drives to their limit. When this happens you will be lucky to get 1 year and more likely it will fail around 8 months. This is nothing to do with uTorrent but to do with the design of the hardware. Add into the mix bad firmware and you will find the drives will start to time out and cannot cope with the pace. Anything with moving parts will only last so long heat and friction dictates this is the case.

In summary don't blame uTorrent for your addiction to downloading p0rn buy a raid card some decent hard drives and spread the load over multiple drives.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 year later...
If there's a CRC error, you need to copy whatever data you can to another drive, and reload the torrent in utorrent.

What do you mean copy to another drive? You mean copy all my files and programs/software to another hard drive? Laptops only have one hard drive as far as I'm aware of.

It's been said here that CRC means hard drive's failing. But what's the exact definition of cyclic redundancy check?

Anytime I download something, I scan it for viruses and such. No files have had any. And I just scanned the files I have right now with zero results for any of those.

I'm a hardcore downloader. Especially with uTorrent. Till yesterday, I was able to download with no CRC errors. It's funny how I can still use my computer for other things as well as download off youtube or a file hosting site like RS. But I can't use uTorrent.

I just spent an insanely enormous amount of money repairing this hard drive and I do not have any cash to repair it or get a replacement hard drive. Nor would I even know to take this hard drive out for the new one anyway.

Is there ANY way to get rid of CRC and keep this drive from failing?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...