I download a fair amount of torrent data with my laptop. I try to support podcasters if they have torrent feeds by running my laptop as a seeder. I also download the Ubuntu torrents to use in my virtual machine as well as seeding for other people’s benefit.

There is a drawback to the use of torrents. Torrents are broken up into hundreds of pieces per download and downloaded as they become available. This creates a large amount of fragmentation on your disk and it becomes even worse if you are using your machine as the downloads run (which I do). The disk slowdown becomes increasingly noticeable especially when I am running my laptop as my development machine and compiling while these downloads run.

I did some investigating into this problem and I have found a great way to solve it. If your torrent client (in my case Azureus) has the option, check the box that allocates and zeroes the download when you start downloading. What this does is allocate file space on your machine in advance which means that the only fragmentation that is going to take place is in the actual file itself which you can fix with an application like contig.

Hope this tip helps! :)