Two problems with BitTorrent

03-03-2007

I've encountered two problems with the use of BitTorrent on my Windows PC that I wanted to share with you.

Ripping CDs to MP3

The first problem I encountered was when I attempted to rip my (original) CDs to mp3 for loading onto my portable mp3 player. At first I thought the CDs I was ripping had some sort of copy protection, so I tested some of the other CDs that I had ripped before successfully, and that too produced the same results. When you play the mp3 files, the playback was broken and jumpy.

It was then that I noticed that my hard drive light was strobing indicating high usage. I'd forgotten that BitTorrent was running (its on a schedule), so I shut it down and attempted to rip the CDs again. There were no problems this time, which leads me to believe that with such high usage of the hard drive, ripping CDs at the same time as using BitTorrent, is not a good idea.

Note: This may also be the case when ripping CDs and running other applications that use the hard drive constantly.

Defragging your hard drive

My hard drive was fragmented so I shut all my programs down (including BitTorrent) and set the defrag program in motion. An hour later and the defrag program informed me that it could not completely defrag the hard drive because of the following files, which it listed. The majority of these files were the partially downloaded BitTorrent files (the rest were system restore files and other non-movable files). This might have something to do with the way that BitTorrent appears to download and store files on your hard drive. First it marks out a block of space big enough to store the complete file (ever notice how your available space goes down before the file has downloaded?), second it starts filling in the space block by block until the file has completely downloaded.

So as a test this last week, I stopped adding new downloads to my BitTorrent client, and I let it complete downloading all the current files in its queue. When it completed, I attempted a further defrag of the hard drive and this time it was successful.

Lessons learned: Don't try ripping CDs with BitTorrent running, and don't try to defrag a hard drive with incomplete BitTorrent downloads present.