Can ripping DVDs damage HD?

N

nancyboy

Weaksauce
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Mar 11, 2004
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I was wondering if ripping DVDs can possibly put a heavy strain on my HD and wear it down.
I mean moving all that data onto the drive can't be good, can it?
Any other hardware be it CPU or anything that can be damaged by excessive
ripping?

Just curious, thanks.
 
Hard drives are designed to be written to. I don't think you'll hurt it.
 
Yes using the hard drive can wear it out you should just keep it nice and safe in its original box in the antistatic bag
 
Rip away. I have had my WD 200G full many times, with thought of damage.
 
if you are that concerned about wear and tear on hard drives, wd has a heavy duty series of hard drives with FDB and such for sale over at newegg, check them out... but honestly I use my hard drive quite heavily... have for years (over 10) and ive never had a WD drive fail... no I dont use those heavy duty ones, just the normal ones.
 
Thanks for the help guys. My cousin wants to rip some DVDs & I didnt want my one
week old AMD64 system under heavy load that could possibly degrade performance.

Thanks again,
 
I think I have ripped 1,500-1,800 titles, maybe 2,000+ physical DVDs. I haven't worn out either DVD drives or my HD.

Use it or lose it.

In fact I often rip 2 at a time. The files may be fragmented on my HD but they burn just fine all the same.
 
Harddrives are designed for reading and writing. To this date I never had a western digital drive fail me or a Seagate Cheeta SCSI drive fail me. It won't damage the harddrive at all unless it's made with cheap parts. My IBM deathstar is still working on my old pc and it hasn't failed yet :)
 
yes ... i have damaged 3 samsung and 2 ibm drives (but the samsung are very good) due to haevay load:

- i have ripped 2 at a time
- stripped 2 at a time
- and shrinked 2 at a time

all at the same time ... so the machine runs for some hours and has done the job fine without my help .. but the harddrives was always so fragmented, that i can't sometimes burn at 4x, 'cause the data throughput was not enough (event with 8 mb cache) ... so i have to defragment the hd to burn it and this has taken hours too and most of the time the windows xp defragment tool can't really defragment the hd ... so i have around 15,000 fragments per vob-file !! ...

when you do this some times (0,5 - 1 year) you can imagine that the hd is shrinked down and begins to click or doing some strange sounds and then you can't use them anymore and have to rma it ;-)

but there is no problem when you just rip some dvd's ....
 
vsyncer said:
when you do this some times (0,5 - 1 year) you can imagine that the hd is shrinked down and begins to click or doing some strange sounds and then you can't use them anymore and have to rma it ;-)
Click to expand...
What does that mean?
 
jpmkm said:
What does that mean?
Click to expand...

I had a little trouble understanding it as well, but I think his point was that if you do a bunch of hard drive intensive stuff it fragments the hell out of your drives making it hard to use immediately afterwords. His second point was that you might hear some clicking or weird sounds and then you should RMA, but that doesn't automatically happen after a lot of use.

To the original question - hard drive are made to be used, plain and simple. They're built to withstand a lot of reading and writing activities, so wail away on them. If you are very concerned with reliability (which you probably don't need to be), look into a RAID-1 that would have a carbon backup at all times or into higher end SCSI drives that are designed for extremely intensive activity. But if it were me, I'd stick with what you have and rip away, because it is very unlikely you will run into HD problems just because of that activity.
 
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