Downloading large torrent files to internal SSD

Quiz

Quiz

Gawd
Joined
Aug 25, 2010
Messages
666
I have a MacBook Pro 14" with the M3 Pro chip.

I tried downloading torrents to my exFAT formatted external HDD but the torrents would simply stall when launched or download at a very slow speed. Then I tried downloading to the internal 512 GB SSD and the torrent peaked at 75 MB/sec.

My question is, is it okay to download torrents to the internal SSD and then transfer them to an external HDD? Will this cause too much wear on the internal SSD? I asked on MacRumors and they said not to worry but still want a second opinion.
 
First of all, stop using exFAT as your external HDD format. It is significantly slower than the Apple APFS partition format. It's garbage, unless you are planning on using it across multiple operating systems. But if that's your plan, then I still wouldn't use exFAT and would instead format it as NTFS and purchase a third party NTFS app like Paragon Partition so you can read and write to NTFS on your Mac. APFS is still the fastest partition scheme you can use on macOS, though. As for your SSD, you're unlikely to wear the SSD out from written data in the lifetime of the computer, but anything is possible. Computers are man-made, are not infallible, and they all have an expiration date.
 
Thanks.

Is there a possibility of Apple adding native NTFS support into macOS?
 
Quiz said:
Why not? Why won't they add support for it?
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It's proprietary and Apple doesn't want to invest resources to reverse engineer NTFS drivers to work with macOS in that way, on top of the fact that it could be a possible point of corruption if it's not done properly. NTFS read/write works okay in Linux, but can also have issues with corruption as well. Apple just doesn't want to deal with it. There are also other issues with NTFS and exFAT in general when used with macOS (other than corruption) such as file permission issues and file attributes not carrying over when copied from macOS to the external drive. Use either HFS or APFS (APFS is the better of the two) on your external drives when using macOS. You'll notice the speed of read and write will increase dramatically when you switch from exFAT to APFS. Another bonus of the APFS partition format is it uses containers. For instance, on my mother's Mac, I have an external backup drive that is split into two partitions with APFS. One is for Time Machine and one is for her business backup of QuickBooks. Even though they are two different partitions, they are shared storage containers. So they both use the exact same amount of storage. It's a 1 terabyte drive, but both partitions can utilize up to 1 terabyte of storage until the drive is full, unlike other partition formats where both halves would be 500 GB, for instance.
 
Just use FAT.

ZFS is of course the cool kid on the block now.
 
If you are worried about wear, get an external SSD, or assemble one from a case and a drive and use the Apple Format and use that as your download destination.

These are what I use, the 2 top ones are 2.5" SATA and the bottom 3 are NVME, 10Gbps (middle one is 20Gbps)
IMG_7149.JPG
 
uOpt said:
Just use FAT.

ZFS is of course the cool kid on the block now.
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This is literally the worst possible suggestion. He's storing torrents, and FAT has a file size limit of 4 GB. It's also even slower and crappier than exFAT. ZFS is a massive headache to maintain on macOS and it's not worth the hassle. APFS isn't as good as ZFS, but APFS has data integrity features such as snapshots, clones, and checksums. It's a very solid partition format.

Zepher said:
If you are worried about wear, get an external SSD, or assemble one from a case and a drive and use the Apple Format and use that as your download destination.

These are what I use, the 2 top ones are 2.5" SATA and the bottom 3 are NVME, 10Gbps (middle one is 20Gbps)
View attachment 654974
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This is a more expensive solution than using external HDDs; about 2-3 times more expensive depending on the type of SSD. Having said that, the transfer speed is also astronomically faster than any HDD. So it might be a good option if speed is a concern. I'm eventually going to make all my backup drives SSDs because I'm quite done with waiting for things to transfer. I'm impatient, and we now have drive technology that is laughably fast. Even my old M1 has read/write speeds of 3000 MB/sec. My current HDD set up has a max transfer speed of around 150 MB/sec. We have NVME drives now that can do over 12,000 MB/sec. It's stupid.
 
Shoganai said:
This is literally the worst possible suggestion. He's storing torrents, and FAT has a file size limit of 4 GB. It's also even slower and crappier than exFAT. ZFS is a massive headache to maintain on macOS and it's not worth the hassle. APFS isn't as good as ZFS, but APFS has data integrity features such as snapshots, clones, and checksums. It's a very solid partition format.


This is a more expensive solution than using external HDDs; about 2-3 times more expensive depending on the type of SSD. Having said that, the transfer speed is also astronomically faster than any HDD. So it might be a good option if speed is a concern. I'm eventually going to make all my backup drives SSDs because I'm quite done with waiting for things to transfer. I'm impatient, and we now have drive technology that is laughably fast. Even my old M1 has read/write speeds of 3000 MB/sec. My current HDD set up has a max transfer speed of around 150 MB/sec. We have NVME drives now that can do over 12,000 MB/sec. It's stupid.
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Ya, it is more expensive but I'd only use it for downloads and not mass storage.
I recently upgraded my internet and had to move my downloads from my 7200RPM HDD to an SSD since the HDD was bottlenecking the downloads, especially when the program is unpacking the files and downloading other files.
I get around 300MB/s download and the HDD does under 200MB/s.
 
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