Torrent killed my hard drive?


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My secondary hdd that I use stricktly for torrent, stopped reading most files and folders. For awhile it would crash Win7 unless I unplug it. I'm sure but not 100% that torrent use pretty much killed it due to fragmentation.

 

Am I right or is this a normal case of disk failure? I'm going to format it but not until I know for sure I can't backup up ALL the files. I was able to get some but I know files and folders are missing. What can I do?

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Torrents don't automatically kill a drive, but it happens.  Constant read-write takes its toll after a while.  I've had a few download drives die and my first thoughts were the same as yours.  

 

Try to recover the files as best you can, but don't expect the drive to be reliable even after formatting.  Some drives are pretty much toast once this happens.

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I've only had the drive for a year. But I do understand hard drive failures are spontaneous.

1. Once I format it, how can I check if it's 100% healthy? Chkdsk?

2. How can I prevent this from happening again? Assuming it's the constant read/write of torrenting. Monthly defragmenting? Go with SSD?

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A drive can fail in one month to 10+ years. There's no life expectancy.

 

IMHO, don't format it. RMA it. get a replacement drive.

 

You don't need a SSD. Windows 7 does defragmenting on the fly.

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Have you tried using a differant cable to connect the drive, my sister's external drive was showing similar problems and it turned out that the usb cable was damaged.

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Have you tried using a differant cable to connect the drive, my sister's external drive was showing similar problems and it turned out that the usb cable was damaged.

Yes. It's a secondary drive in my laptop that happened and I've also tried it on a docking station.

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IMO I don't think it's toast. But I'd like to know for sure. What software should I use to check?

 

If there's anything wrong with it, I'd send it in for RMA, get a new drive, that works 100%.

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If there's anything wrong with it, I'd send it in for RMA, get a new drive, that works 100%.

Ok. Just need to check the warranty period on it and when exactly it was purchased. It's a WD btw.

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Like I said, it's random. I use my 500GB as my torrent drive. I'm seeing no degradation. Was torrenting the only factor? I doubt it. That and a group of other factors, I'd believe that.

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It's unlikely. Torrenting causes frequent access to your hard disk, true, but so does Windows with the pagefile. A more probable reason would be the hard disk being shocked (especially since it's constantly working, damaging the hard disk would require a mere nudge), or simple bad luck.

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Drives die. It was very likely a contributing factor. Torrenting, especially on fast connections, hammers the drive due to constant random reads and writes all over the place (defragmenting wouldn't help that, I might add). It experiences a lot of mechanical stress and also heats up considerably. These days HDD is one of the finest pieces of mechanical engineering and while it has many safeguards that increase reliability, it's still very susceptible to mechanical problems, vibration and damage.

 

May want to configure larger RAM cache for your torrent client, so that, with luck, more pieces can be written out sequentially, but there's really no guarantee it'll help.

 

May want to get an enterprise level drive, for example, WD Re. There's various levels of fudge and truth about them having quality components and factory testing, but chief factor is that servers, unlike desktops, are serious business. Server drives are specifically made with the purpose of being hammered, while desktop drives are made with mostly idling in mind.

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Default ?Torrent settings are horrible for your hard drive in order to decrease the amount of RAM used. They constantly force your disk to write out all over the place.

 

Changing the settings will not only allow you to torrent faster, it'll put much less stress on your disk. Especially on noisy drives it can also make torrenting a much quieter activity and it'll probably save power on laptops.

 

The best settings, in my opinion:

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(If you've got less than 8GB RAM you might want to decrease the size to 512MB. But I wouldn't go below that.)

 

Writing out untouched blocks every two minutes, or finished pieces right away isn't needed. If you disable both those options ?Torrent will write out those things more sequentially so your disk doesn't have to jump from place to place all the time. If you run an older version of ?Torrent (2.x, and you should), you should also not let it bypass Windows read and write caching as those will strain your hard drive even less.

 

The ?Torrent default settings seem to date from a time where RAM was sparse and connections are slow. Nowadays we have tons of RAM and connections are quite fast. On my 200Mbps connection ?Torrent starts to struggle writing out the cache fast enough to keep up with the download speeds, which leads to download speeds dropping. Changing my cache settings to these not only led to faster torrenting but much less writes to the disk too. If you look at a torrent, go to the speed tab and let it show disk statistics you can see how with a bigger cache you get less and bigger writes instead of a lot of small writes.

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Will do. Thanks.

But back to my original question. How likely is it that torrenting was a factor. Anyone else experience failures with a torrent drive?

 

That depends on how disk intensive the action is. It can also be operating at too high temperatures.

Either way, smartmontools will tell you about temperatures and how many hours the disk has been in operation since it was manufactured, how many times it was powered on and off, etc.. and some other data like how many times there was a failure in writing or reading on the hard disk.

Just make sure you run the long test. it may take two hours but it will tell you what happened.

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