Bit torrent and SSDs ?

Does using bit torrent decrease the lifespan and/or performance of an SSD?

If it does, is configuring the bit torrent client to download the files to an external hdd enough to save the ssd form harm?

I use utorrent to download music and films. Not too heavily, though. 20 gb in total each month. Maybe a bit more...

Is direct downloads using a download accelerator such as jdownloader also harmful to the SSD?

My direct downloads make up much more; around 100 gb each month, I estimate.

Thanks in advance for your replies.

 

i do my torrents on the server as i can't be bothered to have my laptop/desktop running for a long download. but while it would affect it, i'm not thinking it affects much enough to matter.

 

Writes are what breaks down a ssd, and torrenting is downloading files so its a constant write.

it will definitely decrease the lifespan, and there is not a single benefit to using a SSD for downloading.

If SSD is your only option then just do it, but if you have a second hdd you can use, then use that instead.

 

20GB per month is not going to be any problem. If it was 20GB per day just from torrents I'd say save it somewhere else.



Source:
Q&A: Tom's Hardware And Kingston On SSD Technology : Kingston Up Close

 

One thing I have to wonder though is that torrenting is slowly filling the file over time so I wonder if it will write to the blocks differently than say transfering a 20gb file in one go, and it writes the file in many small pieces.

So I think it possibly can be writing/using many more blocks than just a normal write function would making the "damage" to the SSD much greater than normally rated for that same amount of data transfer.

Again not trying to make it sound like the end of the world, 20GB a month is not a lot of data but would definitely use a HDD instead if the option is there.

 

torrents where very disk trashy in the beginning indeed. but they improved massively and today don't really write much to disk. so it shouldn't be much worse anymore than downloading the same without torrent.

 

The torrent program should have a disk or write cache settings.

 

Even if it's 20 GB of writes a day, a good MLC drive can handle that for years and years. IIRC, the Intel MLC drives are rated for 20GB/day for 5 years before the first cell fails.

I'd say that unless you *know* that you write more than 20 GB per day each and every day you absolutely shouldn't worry about it.

Edit: Just re-read the original post. Any reasonable MLC SSD would be fine for you, meurglys0. Your usage is nowhere near being problematic -- you're about an order of magnitude off from even having to think about this sort of thing.

 

Torrents will consist of several small random writes, which is where the most write amplification occurs and the most "damage" to the SSD will happen. For every small chunk of data your BT client downloads, the SSD will have to erase and re-write a 4kb block of the drive.

I've read things about BT being hard on even mechanical drives, so I do all my torrenting on an external drive just to be safe.

 

that is not necessary true.

 

Is there any caching on the OS drive for bt downloads? I mean even if we direct the download to an external disk, will it still hurt the SSD for some reason?


--

 

I'm pretty sure there is quite some caching because sometimes the torrent has started downloading for a couple of minutes but there is no file on the disk yet.

 

I can say that it does cache to RAM then writes periodically to disk. At least uTorrent does because file size in uTorrent is not close to what it is on disk. I don't know why it would go straight to disk to be honest with you.

But that is a good point. I am considering a RAM disk, and when downloading torrents then save them there and then move them to my hard drive.

 

utorrent saves each chunk (they're 4kb, right?) only once on disk: when loaded. so it does not matter if you download them sequencially or randomly. if you download a 20gb bluray movie, it writes it in 4kb chunks to disk, with overall 20gb written in the end. there's no overhead except for the tiny information file on what chunks are downloaded and which aren't.

you have a 20gb ramdisk? (or consider downloading something like lotr extended bluray, which most likely will be around 80gb or so, one torrent. not talking about legality here, but torrents are not great for small files, they're great for huge files/collections. a ramdisk is simply not possible here )

 

Most of the stuff I download is less than five or six GB, typically much smaller.

 

still a huge ramdisk for about nothing. doesn't matter if that 6gb gets written in 4kb junks to disk, or sequencially when copying out of the ramdisk. at least with utorrent, there's no overhead afaik

 

just get an unused machine(even a 10 years old notebook would do) and run torrent there.

 

not to save the ssd per se, but yes, to let it run overnight or while you're not at home and have your laptop with you, indeed. some sort of server solution for long-going-on tasks is awesome anyways. (whs ftw).