hardware advice, suggestions?

[cubic101]

hey, as said in previous posts ive just built a new system, corei5 ect.

now im still having the trouble when bitcomet is downloading from 800kB/s and over it gets very slugggish, and then eventually crashes, the famous "bitcomet has encountered a problem and needs to close" error this happens daily

my question to the tech staff is.... currently im using a 500GB WD caviar green HD for my OS and for downloads and everything really, my disk write hit ratio is only between 30 and 40% now on my old P4 i was getting between 70 and 80% (a much slower system) back to the question, do you recommend i get another HD for the sole purpose of housing my downloads? is the caviar green just not good enough? im begining to think so.

does bitcomet work better when it has its own HD to store/read/write?

thanks for the help in advance.

[cassie]

Please make sure to post in the proper forum (this one is for reporting "bugs").

*topic moved to General Questions*

[Dark_Shroud]

Yes a Caviar Green drive wouldn't mix well with BitTorren in addition to other things like gaming. WD Green drives are variable speed drives, they spin up between 5,400rpm & 7,200rpm and essentially only go as fast as they need to. If you want really high performance get a WD Caviar Black drive or go middle of the road with a Caviar Blue Drive.

[greywizard]

hey, as said in previous posts ive just built a new system, corei5 ect.

If you believe that by mentioning previous posts, somebody will actually go and read your specs from there, you're mistaking.

You should have, either posted in continuation to one of your older posts (necroposting is acceptable if your actual post is an addition to one of your older posts with a continuation of the same problem) or should have provided all your system and setup specs, all over again.

BitComet doesn't need its own separate drive. Nevertheless, if you run applications which constantly perform intensive read/write operations with the hdd, simultaneously, while running BitComet, this might put significant stress on your hard-drive. However when your BC speed exceeds 500KB/s, the cache mechanism kicks in and takes over.

So, all you really need, is to have had your hdd defragmented relatively recently and to refrain from running other applications which use the hdd a lot, while running BitComet.

Depending on your average amount of unoccupied RAM you could try and increase the min and max values of the BC's cache to double or even more, to see if that improves your cache hit ratio.

Nevertheless, that doesn't account for your reported system crashes. Those must be caused by something else.

One question though: does your mobo support NCQ? If yes, is it enabled in your OS?

[kluelos]

This technological approach was a gamble, just like RAMBus memory and SATA drive interfaces. The latter paid off, the former didn't. The jury's still out on variable drive speed.

My feeling is that your issue is somewhere else entirely, but you did not provide even the sketchiest and most basic information anybody needs to try to help you. I would have thought this would be blindingly obvious.

[cubic101]

sorry for mis posting and my vagueness.

ill elaborate, SPECS:

Intel COrei5 750 @ 2.66ghz

Biostar Tpower I55 motherboard

WD 500GB caviar green

Nvidia geforce GTX260

4GB DDR3 1333 RAM

Win7 ultimate 32-bit

bitcomet 1.15

i thank you for your points, and yes i agree the caviar green is not ideal for me, i purchased it without knowing its cons, ill definitely get a caviar black for OS and programs, and will use the caviar green for storage, or paperweight!!!

but as i type this post bitcomet is D/L @ +/-1300kB/s (i have a 1GB line) and all is well, i defrag my HD every week, bitcomet has 2-3GB of RAM all to itself, even when i run a game e.g borderlands, everything is fine.

but yesterday and today until now, it was sluggish, unresponsive, yet RAM was at 30% utilized, CPU was @ 5%, im confused.

any help will be great, and to grey wizard i dont know what NCQ is, and if my mobo supports it.

again sorry for being vague in the original post, i was in a rush this morning.

[greywizard]

NCQ stands for Native Command Queuing. If your hard-drive and motherboard hdd controller support it (you might have a menu in BIOS to enable/disable it) you should have a checkbox for it, in the Device Manager on the hdd controller properties page. You can check your motherboard's manual to see if it has support for that. The P55 chipset should have it, AFAIK.

It is supposed to improve overall performances but to some WD models it was reported to generate some issues, due to some conflicts with the caching mechanism or something, apparently. So, if it's enabled try and disable it under Device Manager.

Again, if you do not run other apps which use the hdd intensively, while running BC, your EverGreen is way ahead the 1.5MB/s rate of BitComet. So, this is not the cause for the sluggishness of your system.

With that amount of RAM you can safely try to increase the BC cache size values, to see if you get a better hit ratio.

But in the end, yes, it is always a good idea (if you have the resources) to keep your OS on a faster, separate drive, than the one you use for data storage.

However, when you PC becomes unresponsive, have you tried closing BC to see if that fixes the problem?

How many tasks are you running (dl+ul) in BC?

[kluelos]

... when i run a game e.g borderlands, everything is fine.

but yesterday and today until now, it was sluggish, unresponsive, ...

Is this in single-player mode or are you talking about multiplayer online mode?

The former indicates a system problem, the latter points to a network problem, so it matters a lot.

[cubic101]

with borderlands, its single player, no multiplayer for me my ping is too high as im in China.

thanks for the info on the HD, ill try it out, and also how to i extend the cache values in Bitcomet, since ive had bitcomet over a year and a half now ive never messed with any of the settings, apart from maximum BT task.

thanks for the help, i think im going to get a caviar black, and change my OS to win7 64-bit, because my GFX card takes up so much of my RAM, that 32-bit makes it useless to have 4GB, question......... does bitcomet work on a 64-bit OS, or will it work in the 32-bit mode in 64-bit Win7?

i was running about 17 tasks, all around 7GB in size and one about 45GB, i just found it strange, my old P4 system could handle it perfectly, with some sluggishness, but why my new system, unless ive done something wrong, as i did build it myself, first timer and all, ha ha.

i did close BT, well it crashed, then i left it for a while and it was faster, then i restarted, and all was ok, then started BT again.... system was sluggish when D/L @ +/-1300 kB/s.

thanks again

Edited December 6, 2009 by cubic101 (see edit history)

[cubic101]

hey, i tried the increasing disk cache, and it seems to be better, it was at 60MB, i changed it to 150MB, and its better. will give it a couple of days to test and if no hang ups or crashes, i think problem is solved. thanks for the help :)

[greywizard]

AFAIK, BitComet is on 32 bits right now, so I guess it will run in compatibility mode if you install the 64 bit version.

But I'd recommend installing it as a parallel installation, because some games seem not to work yet, on the 64 bit version. That way you can still test it for a while and if you don't find that all your applications work fine with it, you can easily fall back to the 32 bit version.

The cache settings of BitComet are reached through the Options-->Disk Cache menu.

[cubic101]

thanks for the help, i increased the cache as mentioned and it did the trick it seems, no lock-ups or sluggishness, only problem is bitcomet crashes when D/L @ +/-3500kB/s, i guess that is quite fast, so ive capped it as not to have crashes in future.

will get the caviar black and install 64-bit on it, and give bitcomet a try in 64-bit, will post back with results.

thanks, great tech support here!!! i like it.