Bittorrent use = Premature Hard Drive Failure?

[macpilot]

I have been looking around on the internet for months now trying to determine if constant and excessive bittorrent use causes premature hard drive failure but I haven't found much of anything on the topic. Does anyone here know if this could be true or does anyone know how the torrent programs themselves write/read from the disks enough to weigh in on this?

I'm asking because I have since stopped using my laptop hard drive to download most of my torrents. I know use an external drive that I think is expendable. Once the torrents are done I move them off to various other drives. About a year ago I had a new laptop hard drive fail during some excessive torrent downloading. I believe the head got stuck. This was not due to laptop movement either because it was on a desk. Anyways, I'm not saying that it does or doesn't but that I have since started taking this precaution now and am wanting other people's opinions on the matter. Thanks in advance for any input.

[Ultima]

Drive spin up/down is more harmful to longevity than constant drive access. Look to web servers that often go years without downtime as examples.

That said, if you don't like having the client perform disk read/writes so often, you can tweak your cache settings in Preferences > Advanced > Disk Cache. At any rate, I've used the same drive for years while torrenting without issue. If your drive apparently died from excessive torrenting, then well, my guess is that it would have died early anyway, whether or not you actually used BitTorrent.