Does the RPM of a hard drive have an effect on torrent, speeds?

[dude3991]

Hi,

So I was thinking of buying a new external hard drive and there the same size (2tb) and one has like 5600 RPM and the other 7200 RPM. Just wondering so any help would be appreciated.

[Ultima]

Depends on how fast your connection is. If the hard drive can't keep up, then yeah transfer speeds will get throttled back to accommodate the drive.

[dude3991]

Depends on how fast your connection is. If the hard drive can't keep up, then yeah transfer speeds will get throttled back to accommodate

It's not great. Like the maximum speed we can get is 150kb/s and that's kind of rare.

[Ultima]

Then at least for the purposes of torrenting, either drive would work just fine.

[dude3991]

Then at least for the purposes of torrenting, either drive would work just fine.

Ah, cool. Thanks for the help Ultima.

[Sam Hobbs]

Windows buffers data; I think it reads 64KB at a time. I don't know if it anticipates the need for data and reads a new buffer before it is requested but it might.

Something that is more critical is paging. If your system has inadequte main memory then Windows might need to swap a buffer out. This is unlikely, especially if your system is new enough and has adequate main memory, but for an older system paging is a slight possiblity. Unless you use a lot of main memory for other purposes, 1GB should be enough.

[lithopsian]

I have a pretty old hard drive on my file server (also torrent server) and it can download 1MB/s without apparent stress, which is near the theoretical limit for my connection. Reads and writes can both be cached in uTorrent (in some cases it works better without windows own caching) and this seems to take care of most speeds found in home broadband. My machine is Linux but I wouldn't have thought windows would be dramatically worse.

Rotation speed also isn't the only thing that determines how fast data can be read from a hard drive. I have a 7200rpm drive that is definitely slower than a newer 5600rpm drive in the same machine. Different features also work better for different applications. Things like large internal cache and SATA interfaces can make hard drives extremely rapid in bursts which means good response in most applications, but possibly a very simple fast-spinning drive could be faster for sustained transfers.

[Sam Hobbs]

I think head movement (seeking) can cause the greatest delay so ensuring that a file is not fragmented would help.