Seeking advice on how to config uT to reduce frequency of disk writes

[kupatrupa]

Hello, long time satisfied user, first time poster here.

I'm looking for advice on how to configure utorrent to be able to specify how often (either in units of time or MBs) it should write to the HDD (if possible). I've done some searching on the forums here and tried the advice given to the others, though most of the threads relating to disk writes were simply dismissed along the lines of "who cares? HDDs don't wear out from this kind of normal usage" or "if your HDD dies, just get some cheap old one in replacement". I'm not interested in debating wear or anything that sidesteps the issue in the subject. Having said that, here is my situation and what I'd like to do:

At present, if I'm downloading one file with utorrent, it will write-out to that file once per minute like clockwork (see left pic below). In addition to this, I'm also getting much more frequent writes to the actual application's working folder, especially to the resume.dat and resume.dat.old files (right pic).

Here's what I would ideally like to have:

-Download the torrent entirely to RAM (in most cases, I will have enough) without writing anything out to the HDD until finished, and then write the entire thing out, but still keep it in the RAM so I can continue seeding without accessing the HDD, so that if the PC is downloading torrents, but not being used otherwise, the HDD can stay completely spun down 99% of the time that the PC is on but not being actively used. Obviously, if for whatever reason I need to exit the app before the torrent is done, write out what's done so far at that point.

-For the torrents that inevitably take very long (when your ISP often caps torrent bandwidth to near-dial-up speeds), I would like to set it so that it won't write out until it either (a) accumulates a specified amount (ex: 500 MB) OR ( X hours have passed since the last write-out. This way, my HDD would be off most of the time except for waking up once every few hours to write-out for a few seconds and "go back to sleep" 10mins later or so.

-Completely stop updating those damned resume.dat files every few seconds; keep this file in the RAM and only write to it on the HDD when I exit the application or piggyback writes to that file only when writing out to the files being downloaded as described above.

(By the way, I'm a very light user so don't worry about things like "what if you have 10 different torrents running...it'll keep waking up the drive so often it's better to keep it spinning the entire time")

Here are my disk caching settings and what I think might be the most relevant section in the advanced settings:

(Pay no attention to the 360MB I currently have the cache amount set to, this is just temporarily set to that at the time I took the screen on a machine other than what I'll ultimately be running most of my torrents on. I'll probably be setting this to 3GB on a 64bit OS, as long as it doesn't cause issues)

Is there anything I can do to reduce the HDD writes? Any ideas are much appreciated.

[Ultima]

There's no way to prevent µTorrent from writing to disk periodically, though it's certainly been requested many times before. At best, you can create a RAM drive to store the downloads, and have µTorrent write to the RAM drive, then copy the contents over on completion. That won't keep the data in RAM, though...

[kupatrupa]

If it were periodically, I wouldn't mind so much, but on mine, it won't ever leave the resume.dat files alone for more than 20 seconds.

And in the case of the data file, sometimes my dl speeds are so slow that writing out once per every minute means that it's writing as little as 100KB. What's the point of that? And if it's been requested, is there anyone working on adding in the option to control this?

Thanks for the suggesting of the RAM drive, I'll look into that a bit more. I know of the pci-e physical type of RAM drives but now I'm wondering if it's possible to allocate some of the RAM in the Mobo to create a virtual "removable storage" type of drive. Hmmm....

[Firon]

Well, I'm gonna have to tell you that ut's behavior isn't going to change. There's no point minimizing writes to this extent. The cache exists for performance, not to "save wear on your hard drives" (spinup/spindown is what wears your drives).

[Switeck]

Search for other posts/threads with similar problems.

If it's causing Disk Overload (like others are experiencing)...the problem may be pretty severe!

http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=52774

[kupatrupa]

Firon > I wasn't suggesting that ut should be changed to function this way on account of a few people's wishes- I was just wondering if it would be possible to add some fields in the "Advanced Options" so that those who want to reduce the seemingly unneeded (in some cases) disk writes would have a way of doing so.

And technically speaking, every single revolution of the disk and head movement constitutes wear, not just the spinup/down. In my extreme case, a week of small writes 5 seconds apart does a lot more wear than having the drive off the entire time and only spinning up once for 10mins to write out the completed file. Mind you, I'm not fretting about the wear per-se, just that I wish you guys wouldn't take the one-size-fits-all approach. Caching to "enhance performance" doesn't apply to everybody. Thanks for taking the time to respond

[Switeck]

uTorrent could potentially access the torrent files all from the ram cache if the ram cache can be bigger than the torrent files.

However, uTorrent STILL reads/writes its settings files once a minute.