Utorrent drive buffer torrent client download faster than harddrive

[quote="testest"]I have 3 externals plugged into the USB ports and ~2000 active torrents. Am I basically ruining my laptop ? I have noticed, sometimes randomly speeds with drop to really low and I can hear hardrive loading and then everything speeds right back ?[/quote]You are probably not ruining your laptop, at least not very quickly. It might take >5 years to kill the SSD even with very heavy bittorrent use on it. SSDs likely last longer than HDDs now. Replacing the external USB HDDs every other year or so (for each) might be prudent though. They have far more problems if they spin down often.

Seeding torrents from a SSD is very low wear on it, since that is a bunch of reads without rewriting or moving their data.

I've since found out that libtorrent (used by qBT) does do some aggregate/coalesce writes and reads and/or bunches them up in a way that windows (or Linux maybe?) can do them in bunches which is far easier on the SSD and HDD that otherwise...so write amplification is probably only about 4-20x instead of my earlier estimate of 10-100x.

The random really low speed drops and harddrive loading may be when torrents are created or moved to the external USB drives. Are you using USB 2.0 or 3.0? (Huge speed difference between the 2!)

If you can spare the ram, set qBT's cache settings to 100-1000 MB (the 32bit version of qBT can crash if the cache is set >1400 MB and actually used heavily by >1 MB/sec DL+UL speeds) and raise the cache's duration from 60 seconds to 600 seconds. Throwing away anything in cache that hasn't been accessed in the last minute is probably too quick -- many peers can't or won't download whole pieces (often 1, 2, or 4 MB size) in a minute, but qBT is probably caching most or all of a piece at a time. Limiting the number of peers/seeds per torrent to 30-50 while downloading and only ~10 while seeding as well as the global and per torrent upload slots (so each can get 5-50 KB/sec each) can reduce the disk overload and caching problems some -- doing so can even increase the DL and UL speeds even if there's no disk or cache issues because qBT will use better peers and seeds.

If ram use on your computer is too great and/or it has low ram to begin with, try shutting down other apps and even some background services. Laptops are notorious for lots of specialty branding apps and services for using extra connectivity devices, despite typically having less ram (and less able to upgrade ram) than desktops. Swapping out data and apps in ram to the swapfile (likely on a SSD or HDD) can compound any I/O problems qBitTorrent has!

Another thing that can really hammer files while downloading is active antivirus/antimalware scanning -- some may try to re-read each file multiple times almost every time it gets modified before they finish downloading. It's a good idea to scan completed downloads, but a very good idea to exclude scanning from the unfinished downloads folder/s.