Torrents and hard drives
 

One i was mulling over today... :?

Are there any issues with torrenting direct to an external HD?

Can you see any obvious problems with this set up?

Has anybody actually done this?

The main reason i want to be able to do this is so that i can torrent on one PC to an ext HD, and then unhook the HD and attach it to my other PC without having to transfer files to an external HD when i want to do this.

Any thoughts welcome - thanks :good:

An external hdd is just another hdd. I use them all the time for doing just what you want to and have never really thought about it regarding if it would work or not. I guess you could ask the question, why wouldn't it work ?

hehe, I am just about to set one up...talk about timing...

Not sure why i thought it might not work :bah:
... connecting via Firewire seems to be a goer :good:

Ill be trying it out in the next few days.

Glad to hear it's a tried and tested thing, Jabba

PS - thanks again Bizi

if the ext driver is cut off due to power or data cable being unplugged then i could see a problem. other than that... no problem.

just keep it well vented to keep it cool

Thats what i've always done, and its enver gave me any problems.

Liked has been said before, keep it cool and plugged in, and you'll be ok.

Okay... there's a few peeps who reckon that torrenting can ruin a HD with constant read/writes to the disk.

Would connecting an external HD to a laptop prevent any read/writes to the laptops internal HD, or will the torrent programme still use the internal HD as a cache?

M.

You set the destination of the torrent download in the program. So if you save the download to your external, that's the HD that will be accessed while downloading.

Saying that torrents ruin HD's is like saying you shouldnt use your hard drive or else it will fail on you.

If you do not want to deal with the possibility of a dead hard drive, go get yourself a solid state disk ;)

You should see what I put them through then, 20 torrents downloading and uploading 250gb @ 100 mbit 24/7. Never had a problem yet :)

I couldn't agree more, just put your priceless un-replaceable pictures somewhere else, and then start hammering away, besides hdd's are so cheap to replace these days and I bet you would get a new one under a 12 month warranty anyway.

Better yet, buy 2 hard drives and set them up as raid 1 (mirroring each other) and you wont have to worry about data loss at all. Unless you are very unlucky that is.. ;)

I see what you're getting at guys.

I will back up all my essential/precious stuff, and then go hell for leather on torrents :P

Thanks for the encouragement :good:

Software RAID 1 using external USB2 or even firewire HDD's is so slow your eyes start bleeding from the impatient eye-gouging you start doing.

Which is why I'd never even think of using USB for RAID let a lone the crap RAID that Windows does.

Buy 2 OEM 7200RPM drives for under $100 bucks, throw them inside a PII/PIII and you got yourself a sweet file server that will be hard to fail on you.

Good luck No.1. Try splashing your HDs with holy water. ;)

LOL - i don't think that'll help.

Maybe i'll just cross my fingers :P