Thread: bad effects on HDD by 24/7 working torrent client

Actually, the bulk of wear for mechanical hard drivers happens on spin-up and spin-down. SSD drives do not have this problem as there are no moving parts.

As a point of reference, I have 6 1TB mechanical drivers that only spin-down when I update or restart for some sort of maintenance. They have kept this up for over 4 years.

Comparatively the two 160GB drivers I have had in my HTPC for only a year or so have already started throwing smart errors. This is because they spin up and down as often as 3 times a day. This is also one reason why I boot from SSD.

If you want to extend the life of your hard drive, keep it cool. I have heat spreaders on every drive in my server. I hope this helped.

Also I noticed someone is a bit confused about the complexities of the moving part in HDD's. I've moded several HDD's and I can tell you from looking inside them that there are only two moving parts. The platters and the head.

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Just thought it might be worth mentioning my favorite tool for dealing with unruly Hard Drives.

Its called D-BAN (Deriks Boot and Nuke). If you have bad sectors or bit rot or a boot sector that refuses to read or write correctly. As a last resort don't just erase it. That will only flag every block to be freely written too. D-BAN gives you several methods of "Nuking your drive". I won't get into details but if you google it and burn it it's a good tool to have.