Is Bittorent really bad for your computer?

My dad was a bittorent fan, he'd use to download all types of basketball games and soccor games. But in the past 6 months, he has broken 2 laptops due to some unknown reason. Then he told me today that bittorrent is bad for the computer because of some reason I didn't understand but I didn't bother to ask about it either. My question is, is downloading torrents really bad for your computer?

 

Software can't cause computer hardware to fail. If by broken, he meant it ran different than before he used torrent clients then that would be feasible, but no, a bittorrent client or download can not break a computer.

 

It is to my understanding, that a higher speed hard drive is required to handle the massive upload speed of today's internet connection and computers in general. Meaning you need something that is over the old school 4,200 RPM HD.

Don't take my word for it though, That's just the way I understand it.

EDIT: What I meant to say was, that the files downloaded won't come out right. They'll normally be corrupted or something like that. But Sucka is right, software like bittorent will not "break" hardware.

 

Home connections don't tax a hard drive like that. We're talking a max of what, 2mb uploading here? A hard drive can handle a sustained transfer rate at those speeds.

 

Torrents are NOT bad for your computer. The only way they can be harmful is if you download some crap with a virus in it but I've often downloaded even very questionable torrents and they were fine. On a private tracker there is basically no chance at all of a virus. As said, hardware cannot be affected by torrents.

 

All I know is, any torrent can be heavy on resources when Down & Uploading a good amount of bandwidth at the same time. Some times a PC can fail to recover after exit or finished transfer, so a reset is required.

I don't see any other reason form Bittorent or any other torrent app to be bad for your PC, besides what you download.

 

Nope, been running bittorrent on my 2 year old lappy with a 4200rpm drive for months non stop. Bittorrent can NOT destroy your pc. Being irresponsible with what you download can cause viruses, some which can even destroy your PC's BIOS. Just don't install any software with suspicious looking installers, infact any game torrent should just be an ISO that you need to burn to a disk(or virtual disk), if it isnt then dont install it.

Btw, Piracy is bad, I don't condone it, and there are risks to doing it..

 

As stated aptly by the above posters, Bittorrent is not in any way bad for your computer, any more so than HTTP or FTP is. It's merely a transfer system for getting and sending files. Of course you can always get a virus in a torrent file, but that's true of anything you get off of the 'net. Just have a good virus scanner and practice some common sense.

 

It's not bad for your computer. You just need to be careful of what you download, and look at the file size.

 

Oh. Well, the more you know.

Thanks for the info guys.

 

From what I heard, BitTorrent can cause potential hard disk failure,
but that only happens if you use old/unstable clients with poor/no caching.
So use a modern client and there'll be no issues.

 

Link to that please. I've never heard of software causing hardware failure, that would be a new one on me.

 

To the one who said that he doesn't condone piracy - me neither. I'd like to pay for my movies and games, I myself don't make much a difference, but if everyone downloads the torrents, then the makers of movies and games will go bankrupt and stop making awesome movies and games. I know a single person buying instead of downloading games won't do much good, but I'd like to spread the word. I only download stuff when I don't want to carry my 50 CDs around.

What's the difference between private vs. public trackers? What ARE trackers? My Primus CD is scratched, and I'm downloading the torrent files of the CD, but it's going very very slow recently... I remember last year downloads were always fast (30kb/s+) but now almost all torrents goes to 10%, gets stuck for 2 days, and goes up another 10%...

 

One word......

No.

 

well, "from what I heard"
and it's not like you run the software and your apartment blows up like in fight club.
it's more like BT causing unnecessary wear on your hard disk, which does fail from time to time.
and again, i suppose it only becomes a significant issue with old/untested clients.

 

I don't want to sound like a jerk, but where in the world are you people getting your ideas from that BitTorrent is bad for HDDs?! You could run a torrent client off of a darned USB flash drive for years (which actually do have a limited amount of reads/writes) and never notice a difference.

If your computer can't put up wth a few extra KB's per second worth of random drive access than you've got some serious problems.

 

Well, without proof, i'm calling shens on that. I'm sure you "heard" it from a credible source, but i've never heard of any software killing, or even hurting hardware. Until i've seen proof that software can directly hurt/kill hardware, i'm always going to be skeptical.

 

Well, outside of normal wear and tear on the HDD, I see no way that a bittorrent client could damage it. I would also like to see some kind of a source before I believed that.

 

devil's advocate

i've heard of a lot of crazy things
such as some virus that erases your partition table, corrupting your BIOS, and effectively killing it. it might as well actually kill it if it messes with voltage, etc.

 

That virus doesn't appear to actually break any hardware. The only knowledge I have of software breaking hardware was back in the early days of monitors, when software could specify refresh rates that could actually blow the tubes. However that was due to badly made hardware without the saftey shutoff features found in modern hardware.

 

I would still be inclined to call shens on that. I've never personally heard of that happening, and i wouldn't anticipate that happening from a torrent.

 

What exactly do you mean break? Hardware failure or software failure (Windows crashes, Virus infection, blue screens etc.. ).

The only way I can even remotely link the use of bittorrent with hardware failure is through overheating due to continuous CPU and HDD usage without proper cooling. But that is highly unlikely because most new computers will shut down automatically before any permanent damage is done.

OR those computers your father "broke" were already at the end of their lifetime (old PII/PIIIs), that would have broke anyways...

 

Actually BT is fairly rough on the HDD. If you have a choice don't DL to a drive that's got your important info on it.

It also depends on how many Ts you got running and how much RAM you have. At any given time I got like >10 Ts going and my BT drive is in constant access. If you have like 2-4Gigs of RAM set your cache up so that you you buffer most of the torrent so that it doesn't have to constantly access your drive.

I've had friends that's toasted their HDDs that they only use for Torrents even with proper cooling such as a fan blowing over them.

If you do a lot of BTing make sure your system is cooled properly and you should avoid a lot of harddrive failures.

 

Playing games... surfing web..and DEFRAGING YOUR HARD DRIVE is the worst offender (think about all that erasing and copying) ...shortens hard drive life !
BUT THATS WHAT THEY WERE MANUFACTURED TO DO!

Driving your car on locals roads will wear down your car ALOT more than highway... but damn... thats why you bought that damn thing.

You want to get the most of a product..(100% utilitization)...
Or you can just read WORD documents...

 

Hard drives can be used 24/7 if you provide stable power and keep them cool.

If it fails, it was always a bad drive.

There's viruses that intentionally write garbage to flashable BIOSes, mess with voltages/clocks, etc. http://www.cert.org/incident_notes/IN-99-03.html They're rare, but they still go around. In any case, a good backup of your data is your #1 defense, your BIOS chips (or the whole motherboard if need be) can be swapped out, but your data can't be replaced.