Torrents have a bad rap since a lot of people use them for trading music and movies illegally. But there are legitimate uses for torrents too; you can use them for downloading large files. In fact, downloading large files through torrents is usually more reliable and faster than download them through a browser.

Lots of organizations that distribute their software online need to distribute files that are several GB in size. Projects like Fedora, OpenOffice, and others. Trying to download files of this size can be problematic in a web browser. There are two main problems:

1) If your connection isn't really good, interruptions can cause corruption of the file or they can cause the download to fail. After waiting all night for a download, there's nothing worse than finding out that the checksum doesn't match.

2) A lot of ISP throttle large downloads. Yeah, you have a fast connection. But if you try to use that speed continuously, the ISP will keep slowing you down. The result is that the download takes a lot longer.

Using a torrent can fix both these problems. Since a torrent download consists of lots of much smaller downloads, you avoid problems with connection interruptions. And if your ISP slows down your connection speed for large downloads, they'll typically not slow it down when the download happens over a torrent. I know that with my ISP my downloads tend to be 3x faster when I download large files using a torrent compared to downloading them in a browser.

So if you need to download a large file from someplace and they offer a torrent, don't be afraid to give the torrent option a try.