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.
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.
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.
Not feesible, unfortunately, if we are talking about multiple terabytes of data.
Could you clarify what you mean?
That’s a fair point; however, I have seen special hard drives exactly for this purpose.
I would go with ZFS via Truenas. It makes the setup pretty simple and it will have all the benefits of zfs
Torrents are never equally in demand. A large amount of ram could maybe cache the majority of reads, even to a multi-TB array.