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hard drive and bittorent downloading

post #1 of 20
10/10/06 at 1:31pm
Thread Starter 
I heard it is VERY bad to use laptop to download bittorent files constantly. Some of my friends decide not to download bittorent files on their laptop b/c they said it will kill the hard drive very fast.

I download about 1.5 worth of stuff each day on my laptop. Do you think it is a good idea for me to continue to so?

If laptop HD is died, is it easy to reinstall a new one by ourself?
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post #2 of 20
10/10/06 at 2:23pm
ofcorse if hardrive is in use it will wear out faster specialy laptop hardrive. It is preatty easy to change a failed hd but all information without backup will be lost.
I just ordered Hitachi E7k100 100gb hardware it is specialy designed to be constantly on like a server hd.
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post #3 of 20
10/10/06 at 3:19pm
Did any of these folks say why it is worse to do it with a laptop than any other computer? Or is it one of those things that came from their father's sister's daughter's mother's best friend's college roommate who doesn't really know anything about computers but did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night?
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post #4 of 20
10/11/06 at 2:05am
Quote:
Originally Posted by danimal1968
Did any of these folks say why it is worse to do it with a laptop than any other computer? Or is it one of those things that came from their father's sister's daughter's mother's best friend's college roommate who doesn't really know anything about computers but did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night?
LOL
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post #5 of 20
10/11/06 at 10:54am
Quote:
Originally Posted by smoothoperator
I heard it is VERY bad to use laptop to download bittorent files constantly. Some of my friends decide not to download bittorent files on their laptop b/c they said it will kill the hard drive very fast.

I download about 1.5 worth of stuff each day on my laptop. Do you think it is a good idea for me to continue to so?

If laptop HD is died, is it easy to reinstall a new one by ourself?

Thats BS

...of course it may "wear out* quicker...but lets be honest here...we are talking years and years of use before this happens...its not going to mean your drive wont last a few months...
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post #6 of 20
10/11/06 at 11:33am
Huh?! That's not possible. I use my laptop download torrent files but LONG TIME ALREADY! 4.5+GB each day. Well if proper use of HDD is not that easy to wear out unless you shake it like milkshake, lol

When HDD is dead is can be replace. So no much worry.. The only thing is that, is it DIY-able? For some laptop yes, some laptop no..
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post #7 of 20
10/11/06 at 3:43pm
in theory it does affect the harddrive but ive been dling and deleting probably around 1000GB range on a 80gb sata harddrive over the course of 3 years and its perfect fine. it is not good for it but its fine unless you want it to last like 10 years or soemthing.
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post #8 of 20
10/11/06 at 5:12pm
I'm writing and deleting close to 1~2GB to my laptops harddrive every day and have not noticed any change or any adverse reaction whatsoever.
Also, I don't turn off my laptop ever. Always on, all the time.
Do not worry too much. Just backup your most important stuff and you'll be fine if your HD fails.
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post #9 of 20
10/11/06 at 5:16pm
instead of typing out a long ass reply to say that it really doesn't matter, i will just say; it's easy to replace (i've done it) and it's a freaking computer part, enjoy it by downloading your 1.5Gb worth of pr0n and anime each day.
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post #10 of 20
10/13/06 at 2:38pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by danimal1968
Did any of these folks say why it is worse to do it with a laptop than any other computer? Or is it one of those things that came from their father's sister's daughter's mother's best friend's college roommate who doesn't really know anything about computers but did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night?


BWHAHAHAHAHA LOL!!!!

INSTANT WIN
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post #11 of 20
10/13/06 at 4:47pm
The hard drive will be constantly spinning... no matter what you are doing on it. It is not designed to work forever, most have an average life of 3-5 years for standard users. Though you don't want to be dropping the computer while it is running.. the hard drive head may scratch and ruin the platter of data.
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post #12 of 20
10/13/06 at 8:37pm
I've had a couple of desktop hd's crap out on me after a couple of years of intense torrent downloads. One died because cooling was bad. So yeah it could be possible. And laptop hd's cost more.

On a side note I would suggest you download torrent files on a different partition. I havent researched it but I'm pretty much convinced it's not good for file fragmentation.
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post #13 of 20
10/14/06 at 1:18pm
If you're really concerned about leaving a hard drive spinning all night, Linux can help you.

I forget exactly how to do it (hdparm -something), but you can tell a Linux machine to cache all HD writes in RAM, and only dump them to disk when the RAM buffer fills up, or after a certain time (e.g. every 30 minutes the drive wakes up, dumps all the writes to disk, then goes back to sleep).

In Windows you could do much the same thing by downloading things to a RAMDrive.
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post #14 of 20
10/14/06 at 2:04pm
all hard drives fail sooner or later. wear and tear on moving parts is what does it
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post #15 of 20
10/14/06 at 5:55pm
If you enable disk caching in a BitTorrent client, it can significantly reduce disk activity. But the idea that BitTorrent will destroy or damage a hard drive is just laughable. You should give a good slap upside the head to whoever said that.
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post #16 of 20
10/14/06 at 7:38pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Entropius
If you're really concerned about leaving a hard drive spinning all night, Linux can help you.

I forget exactly how to do it (hdparm -something), but you can tell a Linux machine to cache all HD writes in RAM, and only dump them to disk when the RAM buffer fills up, or after a certain time (e.g. every 30 minutes the drive wakes up, dumps all the writes to disk, then goes back to sleep).

In Windows you could do much the same thing by downloading things to a RAMDrive.

Correct, download hdparm, acpid, and laptop-mode-tools. Then, sudo gedit /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf and you can enable it for running on AC. I personally love laptop-mode. It quiets the laptop down and saves battery life. Alternatively, you can just do sudo laptop-mode on/off. I think I used laptop-mode before but now I am using laptop-mode-tools which is newer.
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post #17 of 20
10/15/06 at 9:28am
well anything will wear out when you use it even ram with no moving parts as it were, so downlaoding via bittorrent as any other use will cause wear. and i would guess laptop hdd's if its not so true now would suffer more then larger desktop drives though you could get arconis back up and do a full hdd clone then you can swap it in if yuors fails. or stop downloading illegal material karma will ballance it out :P

you know for every 10C hotter you run a silicon device it roughly takes a year off its predicted life.
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post #18 of 20
10/15/06 at 8:55pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by matisamd
well anything will wear out when you use it even ram with no moving parts as it were, so downlaoding via bittorrent as any other use will cause wear. and i would guess laptop hdd's if its not so true now would suffer more then larger desktop drives though you could get arconis back up and do a full hdd clone then you can swap it in if yuors fails. or stop downloading illegal material karma will ballance it out :P

you know for every 10C hotter you run a silicon device it roughly takes a year off its predicted life.

Like Guspaz said, enable ram cache and other options like "perform read ahead" etc. etc.

About the 10C info, where did you see that? I'm not saying it's not true, it's because I've never read that before.
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post #19 of 20
11/1/06 at 3:12pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by DDDa
About the 10C info, where did you see that? I'm not saying it's not true, it's because I've never read that before.

http://www.extron.com/company/articl...thermalmgt1_ts
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post #20 of 20
11/1/06 at 5:02pm
So, for me, it's even more than 1 year... My past experiences show that notebooks last more than 2 years...
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