Thread: Protect your HDD while torrenting

Hi, this is not exactly a tutorial but a few tips that I did after my 6-month-old HDD got kaput a couple of weeks back. So after that happened I did a little research and several articles said that excessive torrenting shortens your hard drive life because of the frequent reading and writing of the chunks. So what I did when I bought my new HDD:

*The piece size of the torrents varies between 16KB and 2MB. The default cluster size for NTFS is 4KB. That means that in the best case scenario (a torrent with 16KB piece size) each piece will need 4 IO operations of the disk for each read/write. This is both slow and damaging. The max cluster size in NTFS is 64KB so I set this value when I formatted my new disk:

That way the chunks of each torrent with piece size <= 64KB will need only 1 IO operation. This will make the work with the HDD both faster and safer for the disk. The only drawback is if you have many small files (less than 64KB) you'll be wasting a little more space but I wasn't so concerned for that.



*The second thing was to increase my uTorrent cache to the max to minimize all Disk reads/writes as much as possible. These are my disk cache settings:

I have 1GB RAM and as you see I set 1/3 of it for uTorrent's cache. When I don't use the computer I increase the cache size even more.

I don't know if my HDD break-down was due to the excessive torrenting (my uTorrent was on 24/7 with >500 torrents seeding) but I don't feel the things I did now can be harmful in any way. If nothing else it decreases the IO operations and speeds the HDD a little. Hope that helps someone:001_smile:

Thanks for the info rawr.

What I do is set my unit size to 64KB on all my video content dedicated HDD's.
This is good because I ONLY have video files on it, and they are all obviously bigger than 64KB, so I don't lose space.
Also, having the higher unit size = better performance!
So it's great to know that it also helps the HDD.

Thanks rawr for the HD and uTorrent information. I'd briefly looked at the caching tab in uTorrent, but hadn't really considered making significant changes. I'll consider making a few changes since I have the RAM to spare. I'll also look at my unit sizes - hadn't previously considered the cluster size of torrents before.

Originally Posted by SpiltMilk

Thanks rawr for the HD and uTorrent information. I'd briefly looked at the caching tab in uTorrent, but hadn't really considered making significant changes. I'll consider making a few changes since I have the RAM to spare. I'll also look at my unit sizes - hadn't previously considered the cluster size of torrents before.

Well AFAIK changing the cluster size of the file system can only be done when you format the drive. So you may consider it only for future.

If you didn't make any changes to the settings when you formatted your drive and you're with NTFS then the cluster size will be 4KB. If you want to check how much it is at the moment you can do it from the command prompt, type:

Code:

chkdsk d:

Replace d: with the letter of the volume you're checking. And search for allocation unit size. Here's an example:

Warning: chkdsk checks the integrity of the whole partition so it may take LOOONG time if it is large and has a lot of files

Thanks rarwr. I have been going through TB drives every year :( Hopefully doing a few small tweaks like the ones you suggested will get me some additional life