Download Torrent That Is Bigger Than My Hard Drive

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Since you can install games on a flash drive on an Xbox 360, and flash drives generally have faster random reads than hard drives, would it give Xbox 360 games better performance by installing them to a (fast) flash drive instead of the traditional mechanical hard drive?

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Download directly to external drive, as existing one is full. Or is that only the case if I were to try and put a larger hard drive in the laptop itself? Download the CNET app About CNET. External Bit Torrent hard drive packs a solid punch. External hard drive box with an integrated Bit Torrent client - to come to our labs. Now that the device is finally safe in my Croatian INQ.

To the best of my knowledge, no. I haven't tested it myself, but I do know someone who didn't have a hard drive for sometime and relied on a USB drive. His stuff loaded significantly slower compared to when he finally got a hard drive. As mentioned in the comments to your question, USB 2.0 is likely to be slower compared to your Xbox's hard drive.

Now this isn't my personal experience, but from what I've read and heard from others, I believe your hard drive is the way to go :)

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Yes it does, trust me, I downloaded Skyrim legendary edition on my 6.9 flashdrive connected to my Xbox and it is so much faster! Dude I promise you, if you do it, the game will run like brand new. You will still need the disc to start the game but after you will notice that the disc has stopped spinning, the game will run smoother then ever. Trust me I have tested this and the results amazed me.

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Michael FaircloughMichael Fairclough

I just installed Skyrim on a flash drive instead of the disc and the performance difference is great! For instance, when creating my character at the beginning, running the disc, the menus ran like a DOG. Waiting 20 seconds or so just to view each different race was infuriating. I thought my 360 had frozen or something was wrong with the game. From the flash drive, the menus were perfectly responsive, snapping through the choices instantly. Also, in gameplay I quickly noticed that hiccups in the frame rate disappeared. On Assassins Creed IV Black Flag, the difference was startling. The frame rate seemed to double at times and the graphics improved as if my 720p resolution jumped up to 1080p. It made those games more fun. Instead of compromising and having to just accept and try to overlook the performance issues from the disc, the flash drive installation cleaned it ALL up.

Mark PerkinsonMark Perkinson

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I tend to download about 100GB stuff every month and most of it over torrent and I have been doing this for almost 2 years.
I download things to my windows drive and then move them to other locations.
I was wondering how would this affect my hard drive's health because I have read that HDDs have limited read write cycles.
Furthermore, I have observed that torrent clients write data quite randomly onto disk(by randomly I mean scattered/fragmented).
Will this affect my hard drive's health?

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Actually, HDDs have mean times between failure - they tend to usually die due to mechanical failure or electrical failure, and this will happen anyway, due to run time, not data transfer.

I suggest taking a look at this old closed question of interest on hard drive lifespans here - which seems to reference this paper by google - they have a graph of annualised failure rate for 5 years on page 5. It indicates, outside the first year (when the obviously defective disks die) and the 5th year (by which you may want to consider replacing the drive), utilisation has very little effect.

SSDs have limited read/write cycles, and probably arn't a good choice for torrent storage

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Fragmentation can be an issue, but newer versions of windows defrag automatically, and its a performance issue rather than a lifespan issue. I believe many torrent clients have an option to preallocate the space to avoid that as well.

I personally ended up having a seperate drive for OS, transient storage and long term storage, with the transient storage drive including the long term storage drive's backups. On a longer term, i may look at building a san for this.

A safe idea is to assume any drive can fail at any time, and work accordingly, but I don't really think that downloading torrents has a greater effect than the fact that your hard drive is running or the temperatures its running under,

Download Torrent That Is Bigger Than My Hard Drive
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Download Torrent That Is Bigger Than My Hard Drive
  1. Applications do not determine where they write on the disk. THat isup to Windows which uses the Master File Table ($MFT) a super hiddenfile on the disk that keep track of allocated blocks. So when anapplication such as explorer or winrar or an installer requests diskspace, Windows takes care of which spaces are free from thebeginning of the volume and fills them in that order. $MFT for NTFSreplaced the previously used similar function with $FAT32 FileALLOCATION sp. Table.

  2. Constant thrashing of files write/install/delete/move leaves yourdrive extremely fragmented since each file is unlikely the same sizeas the ones deleted. Find a good defragger that allows maybe allowsyou to specify zones for big files. Otherwise just use Auslogicsfree defragger or SysInternals free defrag tool as a scheduled task. It is not critical to do that often as Windows is multitasking and doing random seeks anyway with registries, cache and %temp% files , but monthly may be ok if you want to see your files more contiguous. Just add a task to Schedule task point to the defragger and set a schedule.

  3. Otherwise disk drives ought to last 5 yrs non-stop trouble-free. YOur mileage may very depending on if it is dropped in an external box when running or a laptop or is running hot in a tower with other drives stacked too close and no air-flow between them.

Sunnyskyguy EE75Sunnyskyguy EE75

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