Comment on Data HDD with SSD catch drive
Maxy@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
qBittorrent has exactly the option you’re looking for, I believe it’s called “incomplete download path” in the settings, letting you store incomplete downloads at a temporary path and moving them to their regular location when the download finishes. Aside from the download speed improvement, this will also lead to less fragmentation on your HDD (which might be part of the reason why it is so slow when downloading directly to it). Pre-allocating space could have the same effect, but I would recommend only using one of these two solutions at once (pre-allocating space on your SSD would only waste space)
rambos@lemm.ee 2 months ago
But that would first download to SSD, then move to HDD and then become available (arr import) on jellyfin server, making it slower than not using SSD. Am I missing something?
braindefragger@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Is that not what you asked for?
rambos@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Well yes, but I was hoping files can be available (imported to media server) before they are moved to HDD. Import is not possible from incomplete directory if I understood that correctly (*arr stack)
catloaf@lemm.ee 2 months ago
You would have to add both directories to your library.
Maxy@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
It depends what you’re optimising for. If you want a single (relatively small) download to be available on your HDD as fast as possible, then your current setup might be better (optimising for lower latency). However, if you want to be maxing out your internet speeds at all time and increase your HDD speeds by making the copy sequential (optimising for throughput), then the setup with the catch drive will be better. Keep in mind that a HDD’s sequential write performance is significantly higher than its random write performance, so copying a large file in one go will be faster than copying a whole bunch of random chunks in a random order (like torrents do). You can check the difference for yourself by doing a disk benchmark and comparing the sequential vs random writes of your drive.
rambos@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Thank you. The files I download are usually 5-30 GB size. I don’t want to max out my internet speed, I just want to get the files in media library ASAP after requesting download manually (happens maybe few times a week)
It makes sense, Ill test sequential and random write performance and maybe even test it since I have the hardware available.
At first I wasn’t aware that my speed is super low for HDD, therefore I was looking for some magic solution with SSD speeds and HDD storage that might not even exist. I have to do more testing for sure