Need some clarification from the developers.

[deeppal]

Disk cache is different, from caching it in memory. Disk Cache is pretty small. The point above I was trying to make was if its not waiting enough long to collect substantial data via caching even, before doing reads and writes and for every miniscule operation, with smaller data chunks, it prefers to go for Disk operation, than its really bad and will screw up your hard drive in longer run.

This is what one of my colleagues mentioned to me when i told him about utorrent.

Vurlix and Ludde have any comments on this?

[ColdArmor]

Oh god not my HDD.. :|

I think there will be a reasonable answer to this considering ludde & vurlix have tested and written the client extensively...

[Firon]

µTorrent caches to memory it allocates, not the Windows system cache. The cache size is configurable. There's also a function to decrease writes if you're concerned about it, called diskio.coalesce_writes. It uses a bit more CPU/RAM to do so, though.

[deeppal]

utorrent has disk cache?

[Firon]

No, it has a plain old cache. It allocates RAM (up to the amount you specify, or the amount it requires with automatic mode) and stores downloaded data there until it's full, and uses that to save on the number of writes required since it allows it to write larger chunks instead of 16kb over and over and over. Probably reads too. It's similar to the other clients, just with a typically smaller default cache, since a huge cache doesn't really help as much as you think it would.