I was thinking of setting up a seedbox. Seeding will mean that the hard drive is being read from virtually non-stop. Is it fair to say that hard drives are designed for this? Or would this reduce the operational life-span of the hard drive?

For example, I was trying to find some spec in the Seagate Barracuda hard drive specifications document, but I wasn’t able to find anything specific to this (or perhaps I just missed it).

I’m not exactly sure if this is the right community to post this, so let me know if there’s a better place for it to go.

  • @SheeEttin
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    61 year ago

    I don’t know, but ideally that data would be cached in RAM. Maybe if you used intelligent tiered storage with a flash tier it could reduce wear and access times.

    Ultimately I doubt that this is going to have a significant impact on drive lifespans. A surveillance camera PVR is writing 24/7 which is more intense, and those drives still last plenty long.

    • @Aqarius
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      91 year ago

      Interestingly enough, there are HDDs purpose made for surveillance (eg. WD Purple), and their special feature is that they’re dumb as bricks: since surveillance more or less continually writes, and only really reads when user directed, there’s practically no start-stop-move head, no predictions, no sleep, no need to cache system files… Just write-write-write in a line, then when you run out of space, start over.

    • @KalciferOP
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      21 year ago

      I don’t know, but ideally that data would be cached in RAM.

      Not feesible, unfortunately, if we are talking about multiple terabytes of data.

      Maybe if you used intelligent tiered storage with a flash tier it could reduce wear and access times.

      Could you clarify what you mean?

      A surveillance camera PVR is writing 24/7 which is more intense, and those drives still last plenty long.

      That’s a fair point; however, I have seen special hard drives exactly for this purpose.

      • Possibly linux
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        21 year ago

        I would go with ZFS via Truenas. It makes the setup pretty simple and it will have all the benefits of zfs

      • @[email protected]
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        11 year ago

        Torrents are never equally in demand. A large amount of ram could maybe cache the majority of reads, even to a multi-TB array.

  • Your Huckleberry
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    31 year ago

    I have seen HDDs advertised as WI (write intensive), RI (read intensive), and MU (mixed use). The advertising says that the WI drives will last longer under write intensive loads. I don’t know how much truth there is to that.

  • Possibly linux
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    1 year ago

    Use zfs with plenty of ram. The ram cache with help with speed and reliability

    Just out of curiosity, why are you setting up a seedbox in a enterprise environment?

    • @KalciferOP
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      11 year ago

      The ram cache with help with speed and reliability

      Are you inferring that the torrents would be stored in ram? That would not be feesible with large amounts of data.

      Just out of curiosity, why are you setting up a seedbox in a enterprise environment?

      What do you mean? What enterprise environment?

        • @KalciferOP
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          11 year ago

          Ah, sorry about that. That’s why I mentioned the 3rd paragraph in my post; I wasn’t sure if this was the correct place for this post - I wasn’t sure where else to go.

  • mnvoronin
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    21 year ago

    Hard drives are quite reliable these days. According to the Backblaze stats, the annualized failure rate for modern drives is only about 1.5%. And these guys beat the living shit out of their drives.

    • @KalciferOP
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      21 year ago

      Thanks a bunch for that link! That’s a really useful resource!

  • @[email protected]
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    21 year ago

    For an SSD: not really, in theory.

    For an HDD: kinda. Spinning up and spinning down the disk technically always comes with the risk of the drive damaging because of the physical components involved, and will eventually wear out. Constant writes would definitely be far harder on it, but more spinning time is always generally likely to wear it out faster.

    • @KalciferOP
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      11 year ago

      Spinning up and spinning down the disk technically always comes with the risk of the drive damaging because of the physical components involved

      Ideally, the seebox would maintain a 100% uptime.

      Constant writes would definitely be far harder on it

      Would there be a difference for constant reads (reading is what the seedbox would primarily be doing)?

      • @[email protected]
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        21 year ago

        Constant reads wouldn’t be as hard on the drive, but again, the more the mechanics inside the drive work/move, the more they will wear down. For HDDs, most failures are mechanical failures.

        That said, even with a consumer grade drive, I personally wouldn’t worry too much about it; modern drives are pretty solid in general, just make sure you backup anything important.

        If you’re really worried about it, WD’s gold line is made for constant reads/writes 24/7 and to be reliable under those conditions

  • @thorbot
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    11 year ago

    Yes, but the number of hours they can withstand these reads is rather insane. I’ve seen SAS level drives with millions of hours of runtime and no bad blocks. They are pretty robust these days!