Setup for torrents (thrashing)

[Cutha]

One of the nice things about transmission other than the low resource usage is its client/server model, so there are loads of third-party GUIs available. If you're using windows you might find this one nicer than the bundled one.

Thanks, I like the GUI. Seems pretty good so far aside from a random crashes. Nice that when the GUI craps the bed the server keeps running.

Since you're on a relatively tight budget ($300 doesn't buy you much in the way of SSDs) I reckon your first step should be - assuming windows - set up a few quick perfmon traces to see what your actual IO load is like under various scenarios to see what sort of IO you're actually going to want to plan for. For example, back when I was running off a single hard drive most of the IO from my torrent dir came from random reads as the torrent seeded - the write IO at the start was mostly sequential thanks to the caching settings.

Now that I have already purchased the SSD's I will check what the actual IO is when I start everything back up. Would have been smart to do before I spent more $...

But if you've bought some S3700's then you're probably going to have way more IO than you'll ever need...

I like having more than I will ever need especially compared to the alternative. I didn't break the bank so I am just hoping they are ok and not in the process of dying when I receive them.

 

[Cutha]

Any advice if the S3700's should be set for Journal drives in Storage Spaces (Server2016) or if they should be tiered with the 3TB HDD's?

 

[i386]

Any advice if the S3700's should be set for Journal drives in Storage Spaces (Server2016) or if they should be tiered with the 3TB HDD's?

I don't know if it was changed in server 2016, but in 2012 r2 tiering was not happening at realtime. It was more like a process that runs every 24hours and moves the often used blocks to the faster tier.
If you want to use parity spaces + write back cache you will need:
n*2 ssds for single parity spaces
n*3 ssds for dual parity spaces
with n >= 1

 

[bitrot]

Thanks, I like the GUI. Seems pretty good so far aside from a random crashes. Nice that when the GUI craps the bed the server keeps running.

Check out Deluge, another bittorrent client that supprts a client / server setup. Very stable, very fast, very efficient and available for all kinds of OSs (or as a docker container). Plus, it doesn't trash the disks like uTorrent does. Even a reliable consumer SSD that allows a reasonable amount of TBW should more than suffice, as the RAM caching reduces disk I/O considerably.

 

[fishtacos]

Changing the cache maximum to the limit (1800 MB) for uTorrent (obviously this varies with client), made a world of difference for me in terms of timeouts and disk thrashing. Provided you have enough RAM, which under 2GB isn't much these days, you can coalesce writes (and offload some reads as well) via the cache, reducing overall pressure on the disks.