Question about hard drive downloads.

Hello. Please help me with my question. I have two hard drives 1. SSD with OS and 2. HDD for storage. I set my utorrent download location to HDD and also my chrome downloads. If I do it like this, when I download nothing with be written on my primary sad right? I won't wear it out? Thanks very much!

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You should be fine that way since you are indeed downloading to the storage drive, not the SSD. I set all my torrents to my storage drive and uses it that way with no issues. Your always going to get a little bit of writing on the SSD because your OS is still doing stuff but that is minor. That being said today's SSD's are pretty good, even doing just every day stuff you would probably be fine saving the chrome downloads to the SSD if you so chose as long as your not running out of space. Most current SSD's should last just as long as your HDD.

 

I agree I have two 240 OCZ's in raid 0 on my desktop been in there over a year now sata II's no problem so far and have my Origin games on them plus the OS.

 

A HDD is more likely to fail long before an SSD. I agree with your data drive arrangement. It makes good sense and many of us do something very similar. But, do not burn any calories worrying about your SSD wearing out. Just enjoy it.

Nothing lasts forever and things do wear out. If you really need something to worry about, you would be more justified losing sleep over how long it will be before the HDD dies instead.

 

I'd like to know where the concept that an SSD is going to wear out comes from to begin with....

 

Don't worry about wearing out your SSD. You'll replace YEARS before you wear it out. I've been running using my Crucial M4 mSata 256 24/7 for torrents for almost a year now (also, I have the pagefile on the SSD).
The SSD condition is at 98% and the projected lifetime is 2022. And that's a conservative estimate, from the tests I've seen the drive would probably last until 2035 at my level of use.

Harddrives are a different issue. I've been running torrents around the clock for over a decade, and in that time I've used up 7 hard drives in various computers, either dying outright or giving bad sector warnings.
Torrents constantly require many small read and right operations, which is not so good for the harddrive with its moving parts. The SSD just cares about how much you write each day in total, and unless you're downloading more than 50 gigabytes every day, there is no chance you'll wear the drive out before you replace it. Realistically, is there anyone here who plans to use his current SSD in 2020?
Three years from now, you'll get a drive twice the size of your current one at half the price.

 

Everything else will pretty much fail before the SSD.

That said, the smaller capacity on your SSD, the less life expectancy. Double the size, you double the life on that drive, it is almost proportional. Less chance you will write on the same blocks if you have 2x as many blocks (twice the capacity)

 

In terms of drives failing, do people read/see much about people having raid 0 SDD volumes failing?

 

Original consumer SSDs had issues where each cell could only be written a limited amount of times. This was translated into a rating called the 'SSD Health'. My 2009 OCZ Vertex 60gb, for example, shows 50tb written, and a health of 43%. I can expect it to fail around 90tb. That's why it's now an OS drive only for my media centre.

This is not to say that they're not still limited by the amount of times a cell can be written and erased, but the amount of writes has increased exponentially since then.

I haven't seen an SSD RAID volume fail, unless it was the fault of the RAID controller itself, and that was from a RAID card.