Does seeding torrents degrade SSDs?

[avg123]

Does the constant reads (and maybe writes too, I'm not sure) seeding a torrent requires degrades the SSD and shortens its lifetime?

[Arika]

reading from the SSD doesn't impact the lifespan of the SSD at all. there also shouldn't be any writes while seeding. if there is, it's going to be so minuscule that it won't matter.

[venomtail]

Maybe if you are writing gigabytes every minute of every day of every week then most likely. But normal reads at a consumer level? Most likely won't see any difference.

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, avg123 said:

Does the constant reads (and maybe writes too, I'm not sure) seeding a torrent requires degrades the SSD and shortens its lifetime?

Very little. While torrents read and write constantly to the drive, the amount of writes goes way down once it finishes, and rather is still writing to the drive things like seed caches. It of course depends on what you're using to seed. Some bulkier torrent programs include ads or other background plugins that are used to track what's been seeded by others.

 

I'd not be concerned about it unless you have hundreds of torrents running, in which case logging processes are likely doing the majority of the writing.

 

The reading itself is not a wear operation except for "power on hours", which no drive ever dies from power on hours. They only die from electrical-mechanical failure over time, which is why people say not to turn the PC off. SSD's can die from electrical (think surges or power loss failures) easier than mechanical drives, but you're still looking a low-risk problem. 

 

Any computer that is left on perpetually should be on a UPS ideally, and that's just to save the "unsafe shutdown" that can kill the drives, SSD or not.

[TomChaai]

This kind of argument lasted for at least 20 years, I still remembered reading about this when I just got on the internet, back in the days when 40GB hard drives were considered premium.

Back in the days they were worrying about excessive torrenting caused a lot of seek operations that might wear the drive down.

The myth kept going on, now we are in terabyte SSD era and it still wouldn't die.

Technically, read operations does ZERO harm to your data on the SSD. All SSD wear happens during writes, when it has to use high voltage to pump electric charge into the floating gate. Read operation is simply a charge sense opeartion, it changes nothing.

After all you bought these devices with the intention to use them, do whatever the fuck you want to them, as long as it is not forbidden in the user manual.