Does downloading Torrents cause excessive wear on hard drives?

I suspect that the most stressful to a HDD is being used as a target for downloading torrents. I plan to get a new HDD and use the old one only for storing downloads in progress.

Is this true? How much stress is there on an idle HDD?

Solution 1:

Well, there isn't really a lot of stress on an idle hard drive, but it is hard to say as there are many more factors to it. For example, acoustic mode (changes speed), Power down, sleep on idle... are just a few things that can contribute to "stress"

Typically anything that involves a lot of file read/writes is heavy on "stressing" the hard drive, for example, downloading, anti virus etc.

You can minimise torrents from doing this by looking in advanced options and increasing the amount of Ram used and decrease hard drive IO - This typically means that it will download a lot more to your computers memory and when its limit is reached, it will then write to the hard drive in one go.

I advise that you download Process Explorer from Microsoft Sysinternals, as this will allow you to click on the graphs at the top and hover your mouse over any of the peaks on "I/O bytes history", you can then see what process is taxing the hard drive at any point.

Solution 2:

There's very little stress involved in using torrents, since the rate at which you can send and receive data is bottlenecked by your broadband at a very low speed in hard drive terms. So your connection is probably capable of 100s of kilobytes per second and your hard drive is capable of megabits per second there is no stress involved.

Solution 3:

Just to summarize everyone else and add my 2 cents:

Yes there is some wear and tear, but its probably not as significant as you think. One solution is to use flash drives as your d/l location, but flash drives have significantly less read/write life and may have trouble with that much random access.

Considering how cheap a decent size internal hard drive is, I think your best solution would be buy another one and use it as your download drive.