Torrents- Does disk cache help?

superczar · August 21, 2006, 2:18pm

Quick question..Does enabling disk-cache really help with the life of a HDD?

The reason I ask this is as I use a 250 GB external drive hooked to my Mac-Mini which runs 24X7 as my download machine.

I use Azureus as my torrent client. Now though Azureus is good, it is heavily bloated, and I don’t want that stupid app hogging so much of the system resources all the time.

There are a bunch of other nice torrent clients for OS X like Transmission and tomato torrent which are incredibly efficient and low on resource usage. Unfortunately, none of them support disk-cache, and since the download machinen is running 24X7, I am worried that the continous read-writes may crash down the disk sooner or later…Or is it that I am just being unnecessarily paranoid?

superczar · August 22, 2006, 6:29am

Bump…

bottle · August 22, 2006, 6:46am

not sure but most of the faq’s seem to indicate that this makes a diff only if the download speeds are high ? eg in excess of 500BB/s

Kumar · August 22, 2006, 10:10am

^Yup,the disk cache basically works like this:

case 1 DC OFF:

when the torrent client recieves a large chunk of data (>500KB),it writes it to the disk.Now imagine what happens to ur HDD if the app accesses it evry 2-3seconds.

case 2:DC ON:
If DC is ON,the app collects the downloaded data in the RAM (till it reaches the amount u specifi) and writes it to the HDD all at once.this reduces HDD usage.

superczar · August 22, 2006, 10:41am

^^ But is this really a cause for concern?

After all very few torrent apps support disk caching and I haven’t heard many pepople complaining about their torrent app killing their HDD?

bottle · August 22, 2006, 10:45am

i thot recently bt was one of the main causes of hdd releated failures read somewhere lol

superczar · August 22, 2006, 10:54am

which means I have no choice but to stick with stupid Azureus

Udit · August 22, 2006, 11:26am

no use uTorrent 1.6

superczar · August 22, 2006, 11:35am

utorrent is not available for OS X

Udit · August 22, 2006, 11:41am

then you are in bad luck

chic_magnet · August 22, 2006, 12:02pm

well.. azureus isnt all that bad.. damn :S… try out the latest… i think that might help reduce system utlization…

and well i read it too that bt was one of the newest causes of hard disk failures..but that was in one of the posts in some forum :S… …

so i guess the disk cache should be higher…

and hmm i thought a lot of torrent clients doo have disk cache?? :S

superczar · August 22, 2006, 12:10pm

then you are in bad luck

That’s OK Udit, I guess I’ll stick to Azureus for a while

well.. azureus isnt all that bad.. damn … try out the latest… i think that might help reduce system utlization…

Nah, it’s not all that bad …Just that I hate to see it using up so much of the resources while a lighter app may have been just as good

and hmm i thought a lot of torrent clients doo have disk cache??

nopes, most don’t…

Check this for a nice comparison of most torrent apps: Comparison of BitTorrent software - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

chic_magnet · August 24, 2006, 3:26am

alright.. so how much should be the disk cache? every client i see has minium 4mb as disk cache.. i set azureus to 25mb as disk cache… is that fine?

Kumar · August 24, 2006, 3:40am

what internet conn do u have?If its anything less than 1mbit.no use using diskcacheing.Automatic works best if u wanna turn it anyway.

sunbiz_3000 · August 24, 2006, 9:22pm

I think Azureus does the best work and is the most feature-rich and complete BT client. But since u dont like it, use OSX and want disk cache, then I think the only option left is to use Opera…and then download Bittorrent using Opera. They have implemented the feature of disk cache for BT… and Opera is a nice browser as well…

Opera has also become freeware…and it takes less memory. The only prob I see with the disk cache in Opera for BT is that u cant change it…and its by default at 10Mb…But I thinks thats pretty useful as well!