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Momentus XT for Torrenting?

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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

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