SSD as Download Dump Drive...?

photoshop

photoshop

photoshop

Soldato
Joined
7 Nov 2006
Posts
5,678
Location
Stockton on Tees
Lately ive been maxing out my 20Mbit connection downloading and when I do my computer really really slows down. I've even had times when the application has said that its stopping because its downloading faster than it can write to hard disk. I thought that was strange aswell. This tends to happen when im trying to multitask.

The Drive is a 300Gb SATA-II Maxtor DM which is partitioned as 50Gb for C:/ and the rest for E:/ which is the download dump. Is it slow because its accessing C:/ while writing to E:/ ?

Would a dedicated download SSD dump drive solve the problem? I'm guessing it would be a lot faster at extracting files and transferring files to a dedicated 2Tb HDD which is the archive/library drive (Seagate 2Tb LP 5900rpm)?

Using WinXP SP3 by the way so is SSD supported?
Mobo is Gigabyte DS3 with [email protected]

PS. At Xmas i'm going to build a Win7 rig and if i did get a SSD drive now, it would be used as the OS drive in the new build.
 
can't say I've ever seen this problem before mate

what sort of speeds do you get with hdtach etc on your drive?

I can download at full pelt whilst extracting to the same drive on 20Mbit ntl, and that is using a really old centrino laptop, with some generic old 80gb hard drive
 
An SSD would certainly solve the problem, but tbh first i'd say you should look into caching options in your download client.
Also check that the HDD isn't running in PIO mode, have a google for the issue.
 
bledd. said:
what sort of speeds do you get with hdtach etc on your drive?
Click to expand...

50436698.jpg
 
Could just be I/O contention, that access time is fairly high too. Try moving your download folder to your 2Tb HDD temporarily and see if that helps.

If it does then you just need to move your download folder of your OS drive, either to an SSD or a HDD, would'nt matter which in this case. Main thing would be to have it on a seperate phisical drive.
 
photoshop said:
Lately ive been maxing out my 20Mbit connection downloading and when I do my computer really really slows down. I've even had times when the application has said that its stopping because its downloading faster than it can write to hard disk. I thought that was strange aswell. This tends to happen when im trying to multitask.

The Drive is a 300Gb SATA-II Maxtor DM which is partitioned as 50Gb for C:/ and the rest for E:/ which is the download dump. Is it slow because its accessing C:/ while writing to E:/ ?

Would a dedicated download SSD dump drive solve the problem? I'm guessing it would be a lot faster at extracting files and transferring files to a dedicated 2Tb HDD which is the archive/library drive (Seagate 2Tb LP 5900rpm)?

Using WinXP SP3 by the way so is SSD supported?
Mobo is Gigabyte DS3 with [email protected]

PS. At Xmas i'm going to build a Win7 rig and if i did get a SSD drive now, it would be used as the OS drive in the new build.
Click to expand...

Use perf mon/sys internal utils to find out what the IO/process bottleneck is. It could be your AV software, etc...

Remember that 20Mb is only about 2.5MB/s, which is nothing at all.
 
since it's such an old slow drive, If you're torrenting to multiple pre-allocated files you are in effect performing a lot of random write operations, which means theres a fairly good chance that 20Mb/s is the best it can do.
Either get a more modern HDD (that supports ACHI/NCQ) or an SSD, set a large amount of cache in your torrent settings, or reduce the number of simultanious downloads.
You could also disable pre-allocation, which would remove the bottleneck but leave you with very fragmented downloads.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom