I tend to download about 100GB stuff every month and most of it over torrent and I have been doing this for almost 2 years.
I download things to my windows drive and then move them to other locations.
I was wondering how would this affect my hard drive's health because I have read that HDDs have limited read write cycles.
Furthermore, I have observed that torrent clients write data quite randomly onto disk(by randomly I mean scattered/fragmented).
Will this affect my hard drive's health?
Answer
Actually, HDDs have mean times between failure - they tend to usually die due to mechanical failure or electrical failure, and this will happen anyway, due to run time, not data transfer.
I suggest taking a look at this old closed question of interest on hard drive lifespans here - which seems to reference this paper by google - they have a graph of annualised failure rate for 5 years on page 5. It indicates, outside the first year (when the obviously defective disks die) and the 5th year (by which you may want to consider replacing the drive), utilisation has very little effect.
SSDs have limited read/write cycles, and probably arn't a good choice for torrent storage
Fragmentation can be an issue, but newer versions of windows defrag automatically, and its a performance issue rather than a lifespan issue. I believe many torrent clients have an option to preallocate the space to avoid that as well.
I personally ended up having a seperate drive for OS, transient storage and long term storage, with the transient storage drive including the long term storage drive's backups. On a longer term, i may look at building a san for this.
A safe idea is to assume any drive can fail at any time, and work accordingly, but I don't really think that downloading torrents has a greater effect than the fact that your hard drive is running or the temperatures its running under,
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