Downloading to an external drive
 

Hey peeps :)

Okay, so we all know Limewire isn't a great fan of downloading to external drives.... but needs must and all that....
Anyways - to cut a long story short - due to a decreasing lack of space on my hard drive, I've been kinda having to do the external drive thing lately....

I do everything as it should be done - i.e. before I log off, I set my uploads and slots to zero, exit limewire - then unplug my external hard drive....

The weirdest thing keeps happening though....

When I want to use Limewire again - whether it's been a day or a week - I plug my hard drive in again (which is where my Limewire files download to), only to find that my *shared files* have decreased - sometimes up to 80 files.... i.e. I may be sharing 3500 files - but the next time I plug my hard drive in, 80-100 files have suddenly *unshared*..... I then have to go into my Saved/Shared files (they're the same folder), right click them and *share* them again....

This has well and truly got me stumped!

Lord, Remoc....?? Between you - you've always helped me with problems in the past. :xeri_ok1ani:

dunno d00d, but I do know that I use my external drives for storage...simple, download to an OS drive, then move to the external...

I guess if you have so many apps and such on a tiny little OS drive, then so be it...

If it's any help or makes any difference.... though I doubt it does.... my external drive I use solely for downloading limewire files to.
Is there some *major* difference somewhere between downloading to your primary hard drive, as opposed to an external one....?

Stating the obvious - I do find that having an external hard drive permanently plugged in seems to majorly affect the workings of my pc. I also *get* the fact that Limewire slows everything down.... but how or why should this have anything to do with my *shared* files?

I wanted to decrease wear and tear on my HD by using a ram drive. Could not get LW to accept it (4.18, haven't tried with 5). Any ideas?

well..if the external is USB2 then it will lag things down for various reasons...

if its firewire things should move rather nicely...

I rarely use my 2 USB2 externals...and I've found it damned near impossible to transfer files across those 2 drives...I get occasional delayed write transaction errors when going to either of the externals from an internal, but after I learned I had to go offline and disable my AV (it was scanning the files as they were being transferred) I very rarely have issues any more...

in summation, USB2 drives rather suck..

Ah, the lag time; makes sense. Guess I should look into firewire (thought it was fading out, but I suppose that's because most devices don't require that level of throughput).

Or I could just wait; solid-state HDs are growing in size and speed, while the prices are beginning to fall. My first pc ran at 4.77mHz, had 128k RAM and no mouse. A teen-ager, who uses computers, recently asked me, "What's a floppy disk?" I don't think he's even heard of serial ports and DIP switches. Another kid I know had no idea of how to use a phone with a rotary dial.

I've ALWAYS used an external usb hdd to download ALL of my P2P, and torrent stuff and have NEVER had any problems. Usually maxing out my connection speed at over 700KB/s. down. Right now I have a 1Tb Seagate FreeAgent that hasn't missed a beat. I never put above mentioned files on my OS drive. I'm just sayin...

I use pretty much only USB2 and even USB1 externals. Never had a read/write problem unless a drive was a goner. I had for a while over 900KB/s down. My ex had a 20Mbit line (almost 2.5MB/s) maxed a lot of the time to a USB2 external. Never had a problem.

When I move stuff between USB2 drives it's usually at a speed ranging between 15 and 23MB/s and unless you run a GB box and have nice axx, there is no way in hell you get close to those speeds just downloading.

The AntiVirus predicament Peerless mentions may be valid in some peoples cases although I never noticed it myself. Guess it depends how you're AV is set up and what type it is.

As for shared files disappearing. I have no idea unless your drive changes drive letter on you. But I would think the fluctuations would be much more if that was the case.

Kaspersky's in specific...v 7x....the newer version I think does better...what was happening is that even though a file had already been scanned, when it was moved to a new location it got scanned again...so, the drive is being written to and at the same time the files just put there are being scanned....errors...I can do a USB to USB transfer, but man, its slow...

the biggest disadvantage to USB drives I've seen is the lag in response many times for a request made to that drive....maybe more modern systems do better, but my ASUS P4C800 series MoBo just doesn't really like them I guess...

Have you tried using a third party copying/moving program? I never had any trouble myself, so I have it more for the nice queuing ability, skipping and a probably pseudo speed increase (most likely because I can see actual copy speed, time remaining etc.), but try installing TeraCopy and see if it helps. Copy your files faster with TeraCopy