Thread: What hard drive would you trust to take the abuse of Torrenting?

Would you opt for a RAID-class, like a WD RE or a Samsung F3R?

Would you go for a cheap, 5400RPM drive like the WD Green or Samsung EcoGreen F4?

Those are the two trains of thought that come to my head. While a RAID-class hard drive is the first thing I think of to be able to handle the stress of torrenting, perhaps the opposite is true - The data isn't uber valuable, so maybe the route to take is to get big, cheap drives and replace them when they inevitably fail.

Assume high torrenting load (100-250 torrents seeding), using a dedicated drive. Would a cheap HDD even be able to take that kind of usage without overloading?

-Z

"... The data isn't uber valuable, so maybe the route to take is to get big, cheap drives and replace them when they inevitably fail."

Your right, but even something that isn't very valuable is worth something in sheer mass/quantity.
Loosing 1TB of rubbish can hurt more than your wallet.
I'd go for a cross between speed/storage space/reliability, not too cheap but not high-end either.

Caviar Black all the way.
Consumer-class performance!

[Seeding from home, that is.]

biggest drives you can get one setup for your downloads and another for uploads usually i just go with the cheapest 2tb/2.5tb drives

since ive ran out of room i have another 2 external drives and 3 internal as a archive and backup

and then of course a SSD and 1-2 highend drives for the o/s programs games etc

Why set up 2 separate drives for download and upload? Not only doesn't that make sense to me, it's impractical - uTorrent requires the "move to when finished" directory to be on the same drive letter as the download directory.

Currently, I boot off of an 80GB X-25-M, and have a 1TB black (which is dying) for storing everything. Backup is a 1TB Green that stays spun-down almost always.

when some of the files im seeding/uploading are 200+gb and more than 3-4 of them i prefer to have them on another drive so i can still download without running into space issues

also i sometimes leave things seeding for months on end only a matter of time till you run out of room no matter how big the drive

really its just personal prefrence

and not really that impractical before that i had stuff downloading/seeding all over the place which was a nightmare

Go with Samsung Ecogreen F4 or even F3 series if it is a lot cheaper. Green series from Western Digital used to have many reliability issues i don't know if they managed to solve them.

The RE series from WD is another class though but i don't think they will justify their higher price in "home users" environment.

I would go with Black WD; if you buying a used WD green, the earlier ones did have some issues as noted above.

WD enterprise edition for me, very stable.