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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Any HDD should be able to get at least 100MB/s sequential write speed. Unfortunately torrent writes are usually very random, which just kills hdd performance. Multiple parallel downloads or concurrent playback from the same disk will only make it worse.

    Using a SSD for temporary files will absolutely help. It should be big enough to hold all the files you are downloading at any one time.

    You could also try to find a write cache setting that works for you. That way what would usually be many small writes can be combined to bigger chunks in memory before sending them to storage. Depending on how much ram is available I would start at 1GB or so and if it is still bottlenecking try in- or decreasing until it improves. Of course always stay in the range of free ram.

    Back when I was torrenting (ages ago) write cache helped a lot. It should be somewhere in the settings menu.










  • I would get a laptop as well in that situation. Just make sure it is one that supports setting the charging threshold. Having it on all the time will kill the battery quickly if it keeps charging from 95 to 100%. It’s much better to keep it below 80%, which should still give enough “UPS time”.

    The battery will also not electrically protect the motherboard from voltage swings. So get a good power adapter that can handle the voltages.






  • This has nothing to do with ssd or their size. Harddisks also have a little spare area (though not as big) and can mark and remap failing sectors.

    RAID (1) is still (possibly) good for the only thing it ever was (possibly) good for: Keeping the system running long enough for you to put in a new harddisk if one fails.

    Think of industrial systems where every minute of downtime can cost thousands of dollars. And even there the usefulness of RAID can be questioned: should you not in that case have a whole spare system, easy to swap in, because more than just storage can fail?

    And what about the RAID controller itself? Does it not add complexity and another point of failure to the whole system?

    And most importantly: will anyone actually get notified of a failing disk and replace it quickly? Or will the whole thing just prolong the inevitable?

    Would you even trust a system that had one disk fail already to keep going in a critical place? Or would it not be safer to just replace the whole thing anyway after one failure?