Momentus XT for Torrenting?

[lapa321]

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1310/1/

I'm considering upgrading my netbooks harddrive and am considering getting either a regular 7200 RPM or a Momentus XT. I also do my work on this thing and while it's fast enough for my use (Photoshop, 3D Modeling, Flash Development, Eclipse, etc.), the harddrive is really slowing things down.

The problem is that i'm also using this to torrent in the background, and i don't know how the 4Gig cache is going to react to that. Is there a way to make the momentus only apply the ssd to the boot partition and ignore my torrent folders?

The store says it's got a 5 year limited warranty, will seagate cover that if the drive wears out before then?

PS: Hmm... i do have a couple of harddrives in USB cases, maybe i can point the torrent at those instead? Will there be issues if i do that?

[datora]

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A 7200 rpm drive will eat into your battery life, sometimes not worth the little extra speed you get.

I'm vaguely familiar with the Momentus tech, how it's supposed to be close to the energy efficiency of a 5400 rpm drive, but uses the 4 GB cache to manage speed & energy consumption.  It "learns" your habits over time.  From what I've seen, about a week to 10 days for most people with regular computing habits.

I'm personally skeptical about having a "smart" hard drive adapt itself to my habits.  I don't like the lack of control and frankly find it "creepy."  Sorry if that's a bit technical ... 

What I don't like especially is the lack of manual bypass options for a situation exactly such as yours.

So, in your situation, I might use the Momentus for my main drive and let it predicatively adapt to my graphics, video, internet and gaming (etc.) habits.  But, for something like torrenting, I probably would invest in a decent, well-ventilated & well-cooled external enclosure and use my old drive in that case and torrent via USB.  Can get cheap ones for ~$10-$12, or better ones ~$20.  All-metal (aluminum) case is good ... it acts as a heat sink & helps keep the drive cool.  Rarely will you need (or can find) a 2.5" enclosure with a fan, so don't worry so much about that.

So, as long as you can keep it cool (stand it securely up on edge, don't block any of its surfaces, etc.), it's already designed to run constant read-writes as a main system drive, so it should be fine.  An old laptop drive in an external enclosure is a small item to keep with a laptop, and it provides a resource as archival and "other" storage as companion technology.  I expect it's a SATA II drive that would run over USB 2.0, which is vastly over-fast for torrenting requirements, so no data bottleneck.

Your main problem might be having a free USB port &/or power to the external drive, especially if it draws its power from a second USB port.  I have that issue with several external drives.  I use 4- and 7-port hubs.  A drive such as this I connect the USB power draw direct to the computer and the data cable through a hub to ensure it gets all the power it needs without stressing a hub, or so I can use a non-powered hub.

[lapa321]

Thanks, that was insightful.

*sigh* no bypass. Guess it's down to the usb enclosure then =(

Power isn't gonna be a problem, the netbook doesn't really get used that much away from the socket. It allows me to bring my references and tools when i get to the office. When i'm at home, it's plugged to my desktop (monitor/kb/m/etc)

I'm still looking for a local retailer for the XT, but until i find one, i'm gonna try plugging in one of my usb enclosures and see how it performs. USB is supposed to be CPU intensive so i'm gonna check how constantly using the USB affects the rest of the system. It's a powerful netbook (It's a dual core Athlon64), but it's still no desktop.

EDIT: Whoops, that link wasn't supposed to be there.

[datora]

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Yah, USB does use CPU, as does network file transfers and even SATA to SATA drive.  It looks impressive when you send a few GB across a USB port, but torrenting (and most streaming when you play a video or music file) isn't nearly so bad.

Example: If I throw five GB onto an external drive, my single-core P4 running at 1.8 GHz will use about 35%-40% of it's CPU.  The CPU use will remain the same when transferring to the drive or from the drive, but takes slightly longer from the external enclosure to the internal drive.

However, I'm torrenting ~5 Mbit/sec (~640 KByte/sec) upload right now from an external drive over USB through that system and onto teh interwebz.  System total resources (including this browser session and avast! antivirus) are bouncing around 5%-7% CPU use.  I can stream most 480 anime encodes simultaneously (also over the same or another USB  connection) and everything still runs without hiccups at ~80%-90% total CPU use.  That's on an old Dell GX260 built circa 2002 with winXP, and usually runs under ~220 MB memory use (maybe ~400 MB or 500 MB when watching anime at the same time).  I can even download at 15 Mbit/sec simultaneously to all of that and this old system handles it with a small margin leftover.

So, your netbook should be quite fine for nearly all your normal situations.

There was this recent topic, also:

> Need Help? Ask Here > Seeding and downloading into external hard drive？

And if you search the forums (especially Tech & Help), the same question has come up a few times.  Might find a couple extra details & hints in those.


I'm using utorrent 2.0.4 specifically because it's really light on resource use; you could even drop down to 1.8.5 if you wish; they're still whitelisted here.

> Need Help? Ask Here > Torrent/Tracker Issues > old versions of utorrent? where to DL ..?

[lapa321]

After a lot of searching, i finally found one last night. Windows just finished patching this morning (Good grief! How many gigs of patches did i download?!)

I know it's too early to judge the full speed, but i expect to use that on my work files anyway, i'm still expecting good performance from 7200rpm aspect.

I just tried copying an 8gig anime a while ago (too big to cache). The old drive was around 30-40MB/s. The new one averaged around 70MB/s. Fascinating that it doubled even tho the RPM hasn't, guess that's where the higher density comes into play. I'm still installing the rest of my work files, and hopefully, see some improvements.

PS: Tried copying smaller files (About 300MB or so each), averaging at 80MB/s

[tomoya-kun]

My external I run torrents on gets really hot even with good ventilation, like almost too hot to touch, is that destroy HDD?

[raandomer]

My external I run torrents on gets really hot even with good ventilation, like almost too hot to touch, is that destroy HDD?

google the operational temperature of your drive and if its over then yes you are destroying the drive

[datora]

.

My external I run torrents on gets really hot even with good ventilation, like almost too hot to touch, is that destroy HDD?

google the operational temperature of your drive and if its over then yes you are destroying the drive

 ^
THIS.

Also, if any drive is operating at ~40°C or higher (especially for sustained lengths of time), you really want to find a way to run it cooler.  I try to keep all my drives under ~35°C, and they're usually under ~30°C.  Technically, 45°C or 50°C is supposed to be safe for many drives, but it really makes me uncomfortable when they're consistently over 35°C.

Your practical everyday running temp should be at least 10% (or, even better, 20% or more) under it's max technical spec.

[kitamesume]

^ thats why i prefer 5400rpm externals with at least 30MB/s average transfer speeds, they dont heat up much.

Edit: try using the drive outside it's case and see if it heats up as much, if it does then theres a problem with the case.

[AnimeJanai]

None of my external USB drives get hot but I use cases that have the drive mounted to metal exteriors which makes sure the heat gets out.  I never use plastic covered cases because plastic is a heat insulator and keeps the heat inside.  Some submodels of hard drive brands run hot too.  In general, the green drives run cooler.  Compared to old maxtors (before seagate bought them) or western digitals, my samsung drives run cooler despite all of them being 7200 RPM drives.  If your external drives are SATA, then you can use one of those external SATA docks instead of a conventional enclosure.  External SATA docks used to be for just one drive, but a lot of them now accommodate at least two drives.  An example of a single-drive dock is my post at:  http://forums.bakabt.me/index.php?topic=12961.0   And you may also consider hot-swap SATA drive bays especially those solutions which let you fit three drives into the two 5.25inch bays in my post at:  http://forums.bakabt.me/index.php?topic=28141.0   Another plus is if the external dock as an eSATA connection.  If your PC case has eSATA, then you can connect the dock via eSATA and have very fast file transfer speed.

You can also reduce the amount of head movement by setting larger cache sizes in your uTorrent or Azureus client especially for the write cache.  Increasing the read cache only has small returns unless you are only doing one torrent file at a time.  By one torrent file I mean a SINGLE torrent which contains a SINGLE file.  I am not referring to a single torrent that has multiple files in it.  Furthermore, head threashing is reduced if you have a fairly defragged drive BEFORE you create the empty torrent destination file(s).  That way, the destination file is not located all over the drive surface which causes the head to whip around.

[Lupin]

 ^
THIS.

Also, if any drive is operating at ~40°C or higher (especially for sustained lengths of time), you really want to find a way to run it cooler.  I try to keep all my drives under ~35°C, and they're usually under ~30°C.  Technically, 45°C or 50°C is supposed to be safe for many drives, but it really makes me uncomfortable when they're consistently over 35°C.

Your practical everyday running temp should be at least 10% (or, even better, 20% or more) under it's max technical spec.

This is a common misconception.

You might want to read google's paper.

The figure shows that failures do not increase when the average temperature increases. In fact, there is a clear trend showing that lower temperatures are associated with higher failure rates. Only at very high temperatures is there a slight reversal of this trend.

Safe HDD operating temps would be around ~40-47°C. Anything lower or higher seems to have higher failure rates (at least according to the paper).

[datora]

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That's a very fascinating paper.  Thank you, Lupin.

A couple of things, though.  The paper states pretty specifically that in the mid-range temperatures (~36°C to ~47°C), that temperature is the lowest factor for failure rates.  Meaning, "something else" went wrong at a far higher factor for drives maintained in those average ranges.  That's not exactly the same thing as saying those are the "best" temperatures.

The observed failures at higher and lower temperatures may be independent of the temperatures, with temperature possibly being associated with other environmental factors.

Still, a very powerful argument that ~30°C and under, as well as over 45°C, are not ideal ranges by a significant statistic.  And, over 45°C clearly and rapidly trends into a higher failure zone ... so that does look like a significant range to avoid.

What's interesting is that all drives from 30°C to 45°C seem to have the lowest failures as a group when 2 and 3 years old; 40°C to 45°C and up still looks significantly more failure-prone when drives get out to 3 & 4 years & up.  The failures at earlier ages may be an "infant mortality" factor of new drives burning in.  Once they get past the 3, 6 and 12 month stage, this temperature range appears to be the sweet spot.

The variation between 30°C and 45°C is ~0.1% between 36°C and 46°C, with it maybe expanding to ~0.3% if 30°C is set as the low end.  What is scarey is to see 25°C and cooler get such a spike.  The only reason I've not been doing that is the expense and elaborate configuration required to really chill drive down below that range.


Conclusion: I am not going to try so hard to get my drives under 30°C anymore.  I'll be perfectly comfortable at 35°C and under 40°C.  And, it will, statistically, be unlikely to make any difference over my habits for the past 20 years. 

My coolest drives tend to be ~28°C-30°C, and my warmer drives tend to be ~35°C-37°C, so that paper made me feel pretty good about my habits.


I hope there's a follow-up for more modern drives on a regular basis, though.  That's a 2007 paper analyzing drives installed 2001 and after during 2005-2006 time period.  A good number were PATA, mixed with SATA, ranging from 80 GB to 400 GB.  My smallest drive now is a 750 GB, with four 2 TB drives.  I've retired all my PATA drives over the past six months and only use them for experimental machines.

One exception is a 10 GB Seagate that I'm using as the system drive on the very machine I'm posting this from; been on 24-7 as a torrenting rig for most of this year.  Installed as original equipment in 2002, running at 39°C currently ... all it's SMART statistics look like the thing is barely out of the factory right now.  I ran it through a rigorous burn-in when I re-installed WinXP back in June and it's been pretty cheery & dead silent before & after.

*knockswood* 

[tomoya-kun]

.

My external I run torrents on gets really hot even with good ventilation, like almost too hot to touch, is that destroy HDD?

google the operational temperature of your drive and if its over then yes you are destroying the drive

  ^
THIS.

Also, if any drive is operating at ~40°C or higher (especially for sustained lengths of time), you really want to find a way to run it cooler.  I try to keep all my drives under ~35°C, and they're usually under ~30°C.  Technically, 45°C or 50°C is supposed to be safe for many drives, but it really makes me uncomfortable when they're consistently over 35°C.

Your practical everyday running temp should be at least 10% (or, even better, 20% or more) under it's max technical spec.

It says : 5-35°C

My thermostat thing reads 56

That bad right>

[datora]

.

It says : 5-35°C [I assume the recommended specification for the drive normal operating temp?]

My thermostat thing reads 56

That bad right>

That's Not Good.  It would seem (according to the google paper Lupin linked to above) that 45°C or under is very desirable.  56°C is pretty damned hot for an HDD.  I've never seen one in person at that temperature, and if one of mine was that hot, I would be very concerned.

What model is it?  Mechanical, or is it an SSD ..?

My professional opinion is that it needs to be cooler than that to be safe, especially for long-term use.

[tomoya-kun]

.

It says : 5-35°C [I assume the recommended specification for the drive normal operating temp?]

My thermostat thing reads 56

That bad right>

That's Not Good.  It would seem (according to the google paper Lupin linked to above) that 45°C or under is very desirable.  56°C is pretty damned hot for an HDD.  I've never seen one in person at that temperature, and if one of mine was that hot, I would be very concerned.

What model is it?  Mechanical, or is it an SSD ..?

My professional opinion is that it needs to be cooler than that to be safe, especially for long-term use.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/591216-REG/LaCie_301442U_1TB_d2_Quadra_Hard.html

[datora]

It says : 5-35°C [ Environmental Requirement ]

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/591216-REG/LaCie_301442U_1TB_d2_Quadra_Hard.html

What that "Environmental Requirement" is about is that the room temperature should not be lower or higher than that range.

A cooler room temperature will help you because it will help the aluminum enclosure radiate heat faster.  So, place the drive in the coolest place you can, make sure none of the sides are blocked or touching anything, if you can get air blowing across it, even better.

We don't know what hard drive is inside it unless you take it apart.  That's usually pretty easy to do, if you feel confident.  After building your folding machine recently, it shouldn't be very scarey for you.

It's not totally important, but if we know the model of the hard drive inside the enclosure, it can be googled up and find out it's operating specification.  And find out if other people have found it to be a model with trouble.


So, it's a fanless enclosure, but supposedly designed to use the aluminum of the case as a heat sink.  If I had the drive myself, I would be able to examine it and come up with some sort of hack ... but, without handling it, I'd be hard pressed to give you exact instructions on what to try.  As I said, cool location, blow air on it is a Good Thing.

If I had it, I might consider looking for places to put holes in the enclosure with a drill or something.  Make sure if you do that NO metal particles AT ALL get into the case where they could short anything out.  I might also consider stuff like soldering thin copper wire or aluminum mesh to the case & try to increase its heat dissipation capacity, and/or even trying to mount a small fan (40mm or 50mm) on it somehow & tap the power.

I'm good at little hardware hacks like that if I have the item in my hands, but can't really advise over the interwebz so much.  Your sensei who helped with your build might be willing to advise you ..?

[Lupin]

It says : 5-35°C

My thermostat thing reads 56

That bad right>

You're more likely to kill the drive in that enclosure by knocking it over while in use than by high temperature.

I live in a tropical country, 56C drives are normal, especially during summer. None of my drives have died due to heat. The primary cause of drive failures I've experienced were due to voltage fluctuations in the supplies. Seagate drives seem to be less tolerant of these voltage variations.

[tomoya-kun]

It says : 5-35°C [ Environmental Requirement ]

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/591216-REG/LaCie_301442U_1TB_d2_Quadra_Hard.html

What that "Environmental Requirement" is about is that the room temperature should not be lower or higher than that range.

A cooler room temperature will help you because it will help the aluminum enclosure radiate heat faster.  So, place the drive in the coolest place you can, make sure none of the sides are blocked or touching anything, if you can get air blowing across it, even better.

We don't know what hard drive is inside it unless you take it apart.  That's usually pretty easy to do, if you feel confident.  After building your folding machine recently, it shouldn't be very scarey for you.

It's not totally important, but if we know the model of the hard drive inside the enclosure, it can be googled up and find out it's operating specification.  And find out if other people have found it to be a model with trouble.


So, it's a fanless enclosure, but supposedly designed to use the aluminum of the case as a heat sink.  If I had the drive myself, I would be able to examine it and come up with some sort of hack ... but, without handling it, I'd be hard pressed to give you exact instructions on what to try.  As I said, cool location, blow air on it is a Good Thing.

If I had it, I might consider looking for places to put holes in the enclosure with a drill or something.  Make sure if you do that NO metal particles AT ALL get into the case where they could short anything out.  I might also consider stuff like soldering thin copper wire or aluminum mesh to the case & try to increase its heat dissipation capacity, and/or even trying to mount a small fan (40mm or 50mm) on it somehow & tap the power.

I'm good at little hardware hacks like that if I have the item in my hands, but can't really advise over the interwebz so much.  Your sensei who helped with your build might be willing to advise you ..?

okay, but I back up stuff on the drive first, yes?

[datora]

.

but I back up stuff on the drive first, yes?

Backing up a drive before you work on it is always a Good Idea.

But, it depends what you want to do.  If you just want to open the enclosure and find out the model of the drive inside it, you can certainly do that carefully and safely without having to go through a full back-up.  Follow basic common sense like you did with your build, make sure you are fully grounded and can't discharge static, don't drop the drive.  Etc.

If you want to modify the enclosure to try & make it cooler, then I'd certainly consider backing the drive up.  Same rules apply: slow & careful, don't contaminate the drive with dust, especially metal dust, zero-static work space, etc.  You would remove the drive from the enclosure, put it in a safe place, perform your enclosure mods, make sure the enclosure isn't contaminated with anything, put the drive back.  Pretty much the same as installing or moving drives around in your main computer case.

I do this several times a week right now, so I'm very comfortable and careful with it.  I haven't backed up any of the drives I handle like this, so it's not necessary ... just so long as you do it very carefully.

[tomoya-kun]

.

but I back up stuff on the drive first, yes?

Backing up a drive before you work on it is always a Good Idea.

But, it depends what you want to do.  If you just want to open the enclosure and find out the model of the drive inside it, you can certainly do that carefully and safely without having to go through a full back-up.  Follow basic common sense like you did with your build, make sure you are fully grounded and can't discharge static, don't drop the drive.  Etc.

If you want to modify the enclosure to try & make it cooler, then I'd certainly consider backing the drive up.  Same rules apply: slow & careful, don't contaminate the drive with dust, especially metal dust, zero-static work space, etc.  You would remove the drive from the enclosure, put it in a safe place, perform your enclosure mods, make sure the enclosure isn't contaminated with anything, put the drive back.  Pretty much the same as installing or moving drives around in your main computer case.

I do this several times a week right now, so I'm very comfortable and careful with it.  I haven't backed up any of the drives I handle like this, so it's not necessary ... just so long as you do it very carefully.

This is a really bad case design for the drive...  there are NO VENTS, no fans.  It is just a block of metal and relies on the metal to conduct heat.  Naturally the metal over time becomes too hot.

So maybe I'll replace the case.