uTorrent kills another hard drive

[cubbiesfan]

Torrenting has taken it's 3rd hard drive from me. I know there is a correlation between torrenting and hard drive failure. I would like to know what settings to use in uTorrent to slow down the death of a hard drive.

...and before people chime in that its a bad hard drive, or hard drive failures happen all the time... you are kidding yourself. Heavy torrenting is hard on a hard drive. The constant read/write/thrashing, the heat, etc all shorten the life of a hard drive.

For those of you that have had a hard drive last 3, 4, or more years while torrenting, what practices do you follow?

[DreadWingKnight]

For those of you that have had a hard drive last 3, 4, or more years while torrenting, what practices do you follow?

Don't follow youtube setup guides.

Realize that more isn't always better.

The constant read/write/thrashing, the heat, etc all shorten the life of a hard drive.

Constant spinning up and down is worse than any of that. Power saving is actually more likely to shorten the life of your drive, especially intellipark on western digital drives.

[cubbiesfan]

For those of you that have had a hard drive last 3, 4, or more years while torrenting, what practices do you follow?

Don't follow youtube setup guides.

Realize that more isn't always better.

The constant read/write/thrashing, the heat, etc all shorten the life of a hard drive.

Constant spinning up and down is worse than any of that. Power saving is actually more likely to shorten the life of your drive, especially intellipark on western digital drives.

Yeah, that too. I've disabled the power saving on my green drives (thanks to warnings on Newegg about the drives).

I definitely know my settings aren't ideal. I don't want to go through hard drives every couple of years. Fortunately, I haven't had a complete failure and I've been able to ensure I have everything I need. I do backup my files but it's not a comforting feeling having a failure.

[kotekzot]

Here's an anecdote for you: I've uploaded about 400TB (of open-source software and CC media, naturally) over the span of 5 years with my trusty old Seagate Barracuda 1TB drive and it is still kicking ass as a system/backup drive. My settings aren't anything special, but try to make sure your read/write caches are large enough to prevent disk overload. I also have pre-allocate all files turned on, though whether it is significant I do not know.

For what it's worth, I'm using the last good version of uTorrent, 2.2.1.

[cubbiesfan]

Here's an anecdote for you: I've uploaded about 400TB (of open-source software and CC media, naturally) over the span of 5 years with my trusty old Seagate Barracuda 1TB drive and it is still kicking ass as a system/backup drive. My settings aren't anything special, but try to make sure your read/write caches are large enough to prevent disk overload. I also have pre-allocate all files turned on, though whether it is significant I do not know.

For what it's worth, I'm using the last good version of uTorrent, 2.2.1.

what are your read/write caches set at? I'll check my settings as well. How many peers do you allow overall and per torrent? What's the max number of uploads/downloads you allow?

[kotekzot]

My cache is set to automatic, which is 32 MB in my case. The following is going to net me all the facepalms, but it has worked well for me:

Maximum upload rate: unlimited

Global # of connections: 900

Maximum number of connected peers per torrent: 125

Maximum number of upload slots per torrent: 35

Maximum # of active torrents: 1000

Maximum # of active downloads: 15