Torrent writes and SSD

M18XR2 said:

@Smarteyball torrent may not kill SSD but "killing it" isn't really correct. as I mentioned earlier SSD may not die after 2 years of straight torrent, but as it gets closer to being dead, it slows down considerably. average transfer rate could go from 300-350MB/s for a high end SSD to 150 when it's nearly dead. so to get real good performance even after couple of years I'd need real durable SSD with enterprise flash, ie 32nm+ size or at least 10k P/E cycle, ontop of that bigger the better.

Of course the SSD will slow down, but TRIM and GC have been improving each gen and the performance degradation not as rapid. The drive will still outperform mech drives. As for life span, it's component lotto. 24/7 HDD use is equally as prone to failure as

Otherwise, if you have the room (assuming it's not a laptop) - Set up a mech RAID volume.


Transfers, unzipping etc is still pretty damn quick.

kbrady1979 said:

Many torture tests have shown some higher end SSD's to outlive their specifications 10x over. If you set the directory to one of the HDD's, the SSD will never see any of the torrent.....there is no reason why movies, music, pictures should be on an SSD because they don't benefit from the performance increase over a HDD. Also, when you talk about average transfer rate, if you are referring to those "awesome" Sequential read/write speeds, just remember you can only transfer as fast as your slowest component, which will be your HDD. To utilize those fast sequential read/write speeds, you need to transfer from SSD to SSD. Quite a few people don't realize that.

As my first few post indicates, I have external raid HDDs, to be exact, three barracuda 3TB in raid 0 each one capable of 200-90MB/s read and write, thus giving me 600-250MB/s, and slowest thing would be my raid0 HDD inside my laptop, which is at 240-100MB/s via esata.

smarteyeball said:

Of course the SSD will slow down, but TRIM and GC have been improving each gen and the performance degradation not as rapid. The drive will still outperform mech drives. As for life span, it's component lotto. 24/7 HDD use is equally as prone to failure as

Otherwise, if you have the room (assuming it's not a laptop) - Set up a mech RAID volume.

yes SSD tends to last longer than its actual life. the 3k-10k P/E cycle is likely for 1% of the cells to first start to die while rest are all still fine, however, dying flash loses speed.. and not a Trim/GC issue.

for 2nd part, I do have laptop m18x R2 holds four 2.5" drive bay and a msata, total of 5 storage bays lol, lappy GOOO!

jimbo45 said:

Hi there
In Torrents remember you are also concurrently UPLOADING parts of the file to other peers while downloading so the torrent client (usually) but not always Utorrent will probably do quite a few WRITES to store things like index / address markers to show what pieces of the file it's got, who's connected in the swarm etc etc apart from the actual retrieval of the data itself.o

so removing the complete torrent also help reduce reads/writes ummm well seeding isnt my thing but good to know

M18XR2 said:

just a question though in Duzzy's screenshot I left it on default cause I was told it's best to let the client manage itself. default was at 4MB iirc and I see yours as 256MB, is it better? or how does it work?

uTorrent has a default of 32MB but is 256MB better, I really don't know. For speed I'm 99.9% sure it makes no difference. If you check my screen shot below you can see uTorrent makes a lot more read/writes to the cache than it does to the hard drive but then the size of the chunks are different and the amount of data is similar. Also I don't think I've seen it use more than 50MB of the write cache not that I look very often, so I just figured give it more than it needs if you have memory to spare but I really don't know if 256MB makes any difference.

Then there are those other setting in my previous screenshot which could also affect how many read/writes are made to the hard drive but I havn't played with them. The main thing is if you read the first sentence it makes you think bigger the cache the better although too big may be a waste and just the size may not make much difference.

I just basically put up the image so you and others could see there is a little control over the read/writes to the drive not really knowing how much difference the setting make.

When I took this screenshot uTorrent had been running for around 1 and half hours to 2hrs downloading at 100kB\s - 500kB\s, uploading at 50kB\s - 90kB\s and I had downloaded roughly 1.2GB and upload 140MB.

alright sorry guys, thread will still be marked as solved by I have gotten couple more info from a few SSD reviewers. in general holds true for all storage devices not just SSD or HDD but random writes are much harsher on storage devices than sequential, as to why I'm not sure yet and will find out tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow when I get my answer from them.

this somewhat make sense because even when writing to drive 4k or w/e block size, random QD1 speed is much slower than QD1 sequential for a reason and this maybe it. as for preallocation it COULD be a method used by torrent software to prevent poor space management on users/ small storage devices or to make it sequential instead of random, then again I don't write the program and I dont design the storage drives so I do not know.

in the end, best way to torrent to a SSD and save its life span would be using ramdisk. have like 4 to 20gb of ramdisk drive for large amount of torrents at once then transfer the file to SSD with sequential write instead of random writes thus saving SSD life.


with that in mind, there are only 2 major issues/ disadvantage using ramdisk instead of directly torrenting onto SSD.

- Ram is expensive, uses up RAM, 32gb would work nicely have 20 for RAMDisk size and 12 for VMWARE/ media editing.
- powerloss, will kill off your torrent files instantly so if you're at 99%, good luck LOL. I don't really have to worry about this because I use laptop and has battery..!!!!

storage in pages on the NAND. 8K blocks make a page, new 19nm and 20nm flash uses 16K blocks to make a page. So when you write a 4K size bit the data has to be held somewhere else (read), then that 4K added to the data and written to the page. Then it does it again to fill an 8K block. Data can be read at the block level but must be written to at the page level. So if writing single 128K data piece (sequential data) each block is only updated once (and you use more of them at the same time). So you are writing the whole page once instead of twice with an 8K page, four times with a 16K page.

my thanks to a friend whom is very knowledgeable in regards to solid state drives on why sequential writes does prolong life rather than random write, which in this case torrenting, browsing net and other stuff.. anyway that is to say with under 30nm size SSD and above 21nm have 8K page, sequential does it once to the drive, pre alloaction makes it twice while rest are all random which is twice more, total of 4 writes instead of once. if Ramdisk is used here I can save random writes and pre allocation, making it writing only once to the drive in sequential transfer.