the forums at degreez.net

Hi, shadow, i like your bt client and also like to see the update of this software. But as you know, bt made harddisk read/write constantly. And it is not good for the harddisk. Could you add a disk cache controller as the new function in the next version. I think it's much better for the harddisk's health.

Aren't HDDs made for reading and writing data?

yes, but didnt you know that every time you write data on it they get cut in a rut?

wish shadow can add this feature in the new version to avoid the constant hdd r/w. i think it's not a hard work to add a cache for r/w in bt process.

Windows already has a disc cache.

For the most part, I don't believe caching is necessary, but I've heard some reports of caching being beneficial. The problem is, if caching is done RAM usage goes through the roof.

If anyone would like to contribute write-caching code, please post it.

I have tried out the bitcomet client, and while it still needs alot of work, it did greatly reduce the amount of disk accesses that I was seeing while seeding/leaching on more than one torrent. It also made my computer much much more responsive while I was seeding/leaching. I dunno about the harddrive damage that he speaks of, after all, the harddrives are made to work that way, but the disk cache is a huge help. it would be wonderful if it could be included, in some form, into bitornado.

from the bitcomet faq: (http://www.bitcomet.com/faq)

How does Disk Cache work?
I don't know what's yours, but my uploads/download rate easlily exceeds 500kB/s, sometimes more than 1MB/s. At that time, my hard disk is making a lot of terriable noise, and the most terriable thing is: long-time high-freqent random i/o put the hard disk into danger (because of the high-temperature I think). That's because the disk cache in the OS is too general. A carefully designed disk cache mechanism in BitComet will greatly improved the hard-disk performance. The default disk cache size in BitComet is 8M, and it may be altered in the Property Dialog. Some statistics of the operation of the cache is avaliable in the Log View, e.g. HitRatio, Read/Write Requrest Frequence, Actual Disk Read/Write Frequence. (Read the discussion in FileSoup)


thanks for all the hard work you guys have already done.