Constant Disk Usage - Safe?

D

dj_2004

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Oct 9, 2004
Messages
7,279
Would it be damaging for a Samsung HD154UI to be under constant use from torrenting (uploading mainly)? Just curious if these green drives are more sensitive than regular drives in this matter. Thanks.
 
I imagine you can lower the reads and writes to the drive tremendously if you enable disk caching and set a generous amount to your ram.
 
In uTorrent, you can set the cache settings. How much do you guys usually set the cache...or are the default settings enough?
 
This is a good question, I actually pull a lot of Ubuntu isos down off torrent and it would be nice to know.
 
I think that you should be concerned with the hard drive's tempratures. If they are not abnormal compared to other drives you should be fine. Make sure to use active cooling if you are not currently.
 
Now that I think about it, perhaps set the cache to reflect however much free ram you have? However, Im also assuming that the larger the cache, the more data you might lose if your system were to crash or if uTorrent is forced to close.

For example, in my WHS the free ram is usually above 800MB, so maybe I would set the cache to 200MB to be conservative. However, if you look in the uTorrent settings, it appears that by default only reads are cached...not writes. If you have a green drive, you might actually want to have a smaller cache because you want constant disk activity or else the heads will park and unpark constantly...which would be more wear.
 
Last edited:
you might actually want to have a smaller cache because you want constant disk activity or else the heads will park and unpark constantly...which would be more wear.
Click to expand...

You are over thinking this.
 
Hard drives rarely fail because they "wear out", though certain activities like spinning up are hard on some of their parts and may shorten their life. The constant read/write activity, especially at bittorrent speeds, isn't likely to matter, it's really not that much work for a modern drive.

That said, drives fail generally because they have manufacturing flaws in them, get bad power or are overheated. A drive that gets alot of activity is likely to fair for one of these reasons more quickly than one that just spins idle, but not by much.

Dustin
 
dustNbone said:
The constant read/write activity, especially at bittorrent speeds, isn't likely to matter, it's really not that much work for a modern drive.
Click to expand...

But what about green drives that are programmed to park frequently? That is my concern.
 
dj_2004 said:
But what about green drives that are programmed to park frequently? That is my concern.
Click to expand...

It will be fine, you are not going to make any dent in the life of the drive trying to manipulate the usage pattern of the drive. Just because it is optimized for "green" use does not mean its going to have a problem if you have the thing maxed out on reads and writes 24/7. HDs die all the time, and how you used the thing rarely seems to matter or people would have been raising the red flags on green drives long ago (plus manufacturers would be eating the cost of warranty replacements, and they don't want that)

Having said that, its a HD so it could die tomorrow while the heads are parked or it could last 10+ years running flat out. No hard drive should ever be considered safe even if you just shove it in a box and forget about it. Back up your important data, that is about all you can do when it comes to predicting drive failures :p
 
Last edited:
dj_2004 said:
But what about green drives that are programmed to park frequently? That is my concern.
Click to expand...

If there's steady activity (like a torrent constantly reading and writing), the drive will not spin down. They spin down when idle, and this would not be the case if it's actively transferring data. I'm not sure what the spin down time is, but you're not likely to have no r/w activity long enough for that to happen.

Dustin
 
The concern with green drives is that the heads are programmed to park after 8 seconds of inactivity. If you are constantly writing to the disk from BT activity, then they never get parked which is fine. However, if you have the cache set large enough such that the drive has to write in every 15 seconds (or something greater than 8 sec), then what you will get is write > head park > head unload > write > head park > head unload > write etc...

Basically a non stop cycle of head parking and unloading.
 
You're fine. I've been running consumer seagate drives in all of our audio workstations (radio stations) for over 3 years non-stop. They never stop playing, recording, and grinding.
 
What kind of drives do you think are inside most modern DVRs? Those things are recording video 24/7, usually at 'least two streams, often while the user plays back something that's already recorded...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top