will default disk cache setting protect my hardrive?

[charliewindson]

default disk cache setting for bitcomet 0.70 was 10mb minimum and 50mg maximum

i've been using bitcomet on a pc i bought in 2008 for 2 years now, i setted the GLOBAL download speed to 850 and global upload to about 400 and after opening the ports and getting everything just right, most of my downloads frequently reaches top speeds along with my upload speed, though i had been careful enough to refrained from removing my 850 download limit, nor did i ever touched the disk cache setting in bitcomet.

though yesterday, i finally upgraded to newer verison of bitcomet, and when checking out the cache setting i noticed it saids that

"make sure disc cache size is bigger than 50mb if download speed is higher than 500kb"

so is my hardisk screwed?

i'm not a heavy user of BT, but i do use it quite often, and i have taken precautions even back then, and back then ppl will just tell you not to let bitcomet exceed 900kbs, and only have 1 torrent running at one time.

and now look at this, if i had known, i would have setted the values higher, but 2 years back in the old forums everyone was raving about the various...occurances of the new versions of bitcomet, and i still recall everyone chanting to download 0.70 for its stability and whatnot. and then ppl would start saying how the HDD is meant to be used and will all fail when it reaches the end of the "manufacturer's life expectancy" and that "with default setting, nothing bad will happen unless you go try and fix it" and other persons would say "oh there goes 3 of my HDDS just this year"

all in all, i can only blame myself for not upgrading

so, would someone kindly tell me if i'll be hearing those "clicking" noices from my hardrive anytime soon?

but sure i can always a new hardrive right? that's exactly what i did with my previous computer when the HDD went dead

(wasn't because of BT, the old pc was nearly 14 years old)

and as i was and still am no technician, it wasn't long before i completely messed up all the internal wirings of the pc and snapping a pin on an important socket on my mobo. that was when i finally went to HP and bought a desktop from them, and quite frankly, i don't want to bother with another incident like this again, so if this new pc of mine breaks, i'm just going to spoil myself and buy a new one, and feel bad about it.

well thanks for letting me know, bye for now.

Edited September 20, 2010 by charliewindson (see edit history)

[Vasy]

What do you mean by screwed? You can scan your hdd for bad sectors to see if there's something wrong.

You can set the disk cache depending on how much RAM memory you have and how much of it you need for other applications while downloading/uploading with BitComet.

[The UnUsual Suspect]

If you use no disc cache at all it won't destroy your harddrive, it will just require constant read/writes to the same sectors repeatedly. Naturally the more cache you use, the less wear and tear on your drive, but it uses system resources to create this cache, so you need to balance the cost with the benefit. If you have an old computer with only 256mb ram, then you will want a small cache setting so you don't cripple the computers performance, but a user of a quad-core processor and 4gb of ram would greatly benefit by selecting a large cache setting.

The recommendation of using more then 50mb cache if your download exceeds 500kB/s is a recommendation only, and isn't required.

[charliewindson]

howdy unusual suspect, its been a while since i last troubled you and the forum folks with my silly questions, how you doing these days?

well thanks for the replies, my HP has 1gbram nowadays since my old junk broke down years ago, for now i've set the download speed to below 450, and i've since changed the cache setting to 10mb minimum and 300mb maximum, as i read in a faq that the minimum setting should be left alone.

well glad to know that it still protected me to an extent for these years, i would like to see it go on for a few more years atlesat

well thanks for the help, cheers!