Thread: Seeding on an external HDD

If your conneting your External HDD through USB then it is definetly slower than your internal HDD that is connected by IDE or hopefully SATA. If you have an eSATA connection for your EXTERNAL HDD then the speeds should be the same.

Im pretty sure you dont need to seed at a faster rate than a usb can transfer so im sure seeding from an external hdd is fine as speed isnt a issue.

Instead of paying crap loads for tiny external hdds you can just purchase a full size internal HDD and then an external case with either USB or eSATA, this gives the advantage of being able to hot swap your drives too.


480 Mbit/s <<< thats the transfer speed of a USB 2.0 port

1500 - 3000 Mbit/s <<< thats the transfer speed of a SATA port

160 MBits/s originally
later 330, 660, 1000 and 1330 MBits/s <<<<<< IDE Transfer speed.

Originally Posted by Hellboy2

Hi I also been thinking about this issue before. Great that someone brings it up here. I prefer to seed from internal hard-disk and not external hard-disk as I have the assumption that it might be a bit faster while downloading and uploding Not too sure whether I am correct....

Originally Posted by s2cuts

What does it matter? You only buy an external HDD if you need to cart it off quickly. Otherwise, you're just wasting your money. For 70 pounds you should be able to easily buy an internal 1.5TB drive, and have enough left over for lunch. How big is your external?

Well no that isnt the reason why I bought my external HDDs. I bought it as its easier than fitting a HDD into my laptop.

The external that broke was a 1tb and was 70.

Ive now got a 1.5tb that was £100

What is the transfer speed of the HDD? compare that to the USB speed i posted above and see which one is the throttle neck.

Originally Posted by Goo Ball

Well no that isnt the reason why I bought my external HDDs. I bought it as its easier than fitting a HDD into my laptop.

The external that broke was a 1tb and was 70.

Ive now got a 1.5tb that was £100

Its connected via usb so it will be as you stated above will it not?

Maybe, maybe not. I have two external hard drives. One of them is a Seagate Freeagent 320 GB drive that is pretty fast. The drive itself would likely be a bit faster than the USB transfer rate allows for, but quite frankly, it's good enough. My second external is just an old laptop hard drive I replaced with a bigger one and put into an external enclosure for some extra storage. The drive itself is actually slower than the USB transfer rate allows for, so the drive itself is the bottleneck.

The real question is, why do you care? Even if USB is bottlenecking your transfer speeds to and from the drive, it's still way faster than you need for torrenting. It's not like you bought your external HDD for high speed performance - you probably bought it for dumb storage, making backups, keeping old movies, etc.

To answer you original question - yes, it's perfectly fine to seed from an external HDD. I keep my external Seagate connected almost 24/7 and pretty much use it as my sole storage space for torrents since I only have my laptop while out here at school. Gets the job done quite nicely. My laptop's internal is also 320 GB, so I typically have enough space to juggle things around. s2cuts already addressed your concerns about the hard drive wearing down. Using USB instead of SATA probably adds a small amount of CPU and memory usage, but I doubt you'd notice it for all practical purposes.

Also, in my experience purchasing externals, they actually come out cheaper than internal drive + separate external enclosure if you buy them on sale. Plus, they're "guaranteed" to play nice together.

+1 to neurowiz...

That covers all your questions i believe.

Originally Posted by Goo Ball

Well no that isnt the reason why I bought my external HDDs. I bought it as its easier than fitting a HDD into my laptop.

The external that broke was a 1tb and was 70.

Ive now got a 1.5tb that was £100

Yeah well, if you don't have a desktop, then you don't have much of a choice. Unless you have any old desktop computer (seriously, I mean anything, P2, P3) laying around. Try something like FreeNAS, or build up your own home seedbox with these instructions: http://www.torrent-invites.com/tutor...ver-setup.html. Look into it, I would not steer you wrong.

I think seeding from external HDD is ok, IF HDD enclosure has active colling! I have two enclosures, one for a single PATA HDD, used mostly for transferring files between PCs that are not connected to home network, and another one for two SATA HDDs with a cooling fan. Well, from my experience, even transferring big chunks of data to/from external HDD without cooling fan, makes it uncomfortably hot :) I would not try to use it for any 24/7 operation. On the other hand, actively cooled enclosure with 2 barracudas in RAID1 setup happily seeds torrents off my laptop 24/7/365 for more then 2 years. When load on the drives increases, the exhaust air gets warmer, but nothing to be concerned with :)

So, again, if HDDs are cooled properly (that goes for internal HDDs also) seeding torrents under heavy load is not a problem for them, even in external enclosures ;)

Originally Posted by neurowiz

Maybe, maybe not. I have two external hard drives. One of them is a Seagate Freeagent 320 GB drive that is pretty fast. The drive itself would likely be a bit faster than the USB transfer rate allows for, but quite frankly, it's good enough. My second external is just an old laptop hard drive I replaced with a bigger one and put into an external enclosure for some extra storage. The drive itself is actually slower than the USB transfer rate allows for, so the drive itself is the bottleneck.

The real question is, why do you care? Even if USB is bottlenecking your transfer speeds to and from the drive, it's still way faster than you need for torrenting. It's not like you bought your external HDD for high speed performance - you probably bought it for dumb storage, making backups, keeping old movies, etc.

To answer you original question - yes, it's perfectly fine to seed from an external HDD. I keep my external Seagate connected almost 24/7 and pretty much use it as my sole storage space for torrents since I only have my laptop while out here at school. Gets the job done quite nicely. My laptop's internal is also 320 GB, so I typically have enough space to juggle things around. s2cuts already addressed your concerns about the hard drive wearing down. Using USB instead of SATA probably adds a small amount of CPU and memory usage, but I doubt you'd notice it for all practical purposes.

Also, in my experience purchasing externals, they actually come out cheaper than internal drive + separate external enclosure if you buy them on sale. Plus, they're"guaranteed" to play nice together.

Right everyone seems to have lost sight of why made this thread. My original question was whether it is a good idea to seed to an external HDD due to its durability.

In answer to the question of why do i care if my drive is bottlenecking. I dont care. At all.

But you did still answer what I asked. Thanks for the info :).

Originally Posted by s2cuts

Yeah well, if you don't have a desktop, then you don't have much of a choice. Unless you have any old desktop computer (seriously, I mean anything, P2, P3) laying around. Try something like FreeNAS, or build up your own home seedbox with these instructions: http://www.torrent-invites.com/tutor...ver-setup.html. Look into it, I would not steer you wrong.

I do have a desktop, which is at home. My laptop is for use while I'm at university. I have already have read those instructions. However I just have my uber desktop at home, which ha itsdowntime while im at uni, which is where my laptop takes over. the external HDDs are a help due to ease of use at home and at uni. Im just conerned because unlike my desktop and laptop, the external HDDs dont get downtime.

Thanks for the tips though.



I am concerned that this thread is starting to rickroll lol.