BT space allocation

[010577]

Hi guys,

wanted to know something with the new versions.... last night i downloaded like 4 series of anime...

i wanted to know if BT allots space for the needed downloads in the beginning of the download....


what i mean is, if i am trying to download 4 gb file, does it say that 4gb of space is already used up in disk defragmenter? because i have critical no space.... since i was only half way through my download, i don't know if it would eat up the rest of the free space, or was the download accounted for already in used space?

[complich8]

yes and no.

Originally, bittorrent preallocated all the space. You'd get a bigass file (or bigass files) that would be the right size, but would end up fragmented as hell and generically bad. It'd then download to that space.

New bittorrent clients don't do this, by default they use just in time allocation. So when you get a chunk, you allocate a chunk worth of disk space. This can be both good and bad.

If you want, most of the new generation clients (I am using a slightly outdated shad0w's client myself) have an option to preallocate or not, and I know at least the one I use has an option to set a rate to preallocate at, so you don't kill your drive (or your network drive or whatever).

Your best bet to find out is look at the amount of space the download is taking up, compared to how big the torrent says it is. If it says it's 4 gigs and the space it's already taken up is 4 gigs, you have your answer i/expressions/face-icon-small-wink.gif.

[010577]

thanx for detailed answer !