Safer way to download movie files?

Hello, i recently had my mac crash and i think it may be because of a torrent program that i use. Would having an external harddrive reduce the risk of getting viruses or encountering problems on my mac?

Nope, I dont think that it would make a huge amount of difference!

No, it doesn't matter where you store the data because the system will still have access to it. I suggest just buying the movies rather than torrenting them; otherwise you only have yourself to blame for the problems you are encountering

Change the program. It won't be the torrents if you're using a Mac. There's a couple of trojans I believe, from porn sites, but there are no viruses.
Using an external makes no difference.

Rewind a bit. Tell us exactly what happened to your Mac? Which Mac do you have, how old is it? What P2P were you using, what was the size of the download. What spec is your Mac.?

I strongly second dan's suggestion: it is generally a LOT easier to rent movies (who buys more than a handful of movies??) via iTunes (or Netflix for that matter) than to pirate them, to say nothing of the risk you are subjecting yourself to.

(and before anyone jumps on me, yes, there are a few legal movies out there to torrent ... but seriously what are the odds in this case? Thank you.)

The cost is really minimal (particularly compared to your time and bandwidth), the quality very high, and the gratification is generally instant.

And yes, contrary to what some people claim, I've seen PLENTY of problems that can be traced back to P2P programs, particularly those written in Java (insert standard Java rant here).