Brickfrog

You don’t need to but #1 could be a bit easier if you prefer multiple torrent clients/instances for organization. qBittorrent / Deluge can run multiple instances so you could have like qBittorrent “A” instance pointing to your internal SSD and qBittorrent “B” instance pointing to your external HDD. That’s just a quick example but I’m sure Transmission and other torrent clients can do the same.

The only tricky bit with multiple torrent clients is that they’d each need their own incoming connection port if you intend to be fully connectable (port forwarded). That may not be feasible if you’re using a VPN that only gives you 1 port forward but otherwise it’s doable, depends on your setup.

In qBittorrent what is the Status of DHT, PeX, LSD when you click on the torrent and click its Trackers tab?

I’m on CGNAT

Your own torrent peer is not and cannot be connectable (port forwarded), unfortunately.

Not sure if you’ll be able to get much improvement, it’ll always be slow or impossible depending on the amount of connectable peers in the torrent swarm. But you should be seeing okay-ish speeds if the torrent you’re trying to download has tons of connectable peers. Does the torrent you’re downloading have a lot of seeds/leeches on it?

PS - If you’re saying everything usually works fine then something changed, could try restarting your internet router just to rule that out.

Most AppImage files are full compiled applications on their own, no need to “install” anything. Just run them directly to start the application.

You may need to expand in your post what it is you’re doing exactly? Or maybe you downloaded the one Appimage that is an installer for something and it is designed to remove itself after installation? Doubt that is what is happening but can’t entirely rule it out.

CPU: socket LGA1200 era Intel Celeron

DRIVES: 4 SATA, 1 PATA, 2 NVME

Just wanted to mention that PATA hard drive may need to sit this one out, depends on whether you want to buy more stuff beyond a motherboard. LGA1200 means you’re using motherboards built from roughly 2020+, it would be highly unusual to find a motherboard with a PATA port in this decade or even last decade. So to use that drive inside the server you’re looking at buying some type of adapter (I’ve seen PATA-to-SATA adapters but can’t vouch for any in particular) or a PCIe card with PATA ports if those exist. Or to use it externally you’d have to hunt around for an old IDE-to-USB enclosure or some other type of USB adapter to have the drive sit outside the server.

I have a few old PATA drives myself but actively using them seems like more trouble than it’s worth

The link is from February 1st, about a blog post in January. I clicked here thinking Bitwarden just raised their subscription price again haha.

The last ancient USB to PATA only adapter I once had did actually support SMART stats, but apparently the adapter’s firmware didn’t support drives over 128GB

So close, you almost had it!

Same, been thinking of just keeping an eye out at thrift stores and such for an antique USB drive enclosure… one that isn’t a Maxtor OneTouch, heh. Or maybe my idea of a janky PATA-to-SATA connected to SATA-to-USB will actually work for SMART info by some miracle.

If I had more space for storing old tech I’d maybe just adopt or buy an ancient desktop that actually has PATA ports in it. I’ve actually seen them come up on Craigslist, like ancient Compaq desktops from back in the day before SATA existed.

Your post title and post body are asking for two different things :P Tons of SATA to USB adapters and drive enclosures work well on Linux, that part isn’t too difficult.

But what you probably want is one that has both UASP support and TRIM support for best SSD support. Here’s the tricky part, even if the adapter or drive enclosure has TRIM support that doesn’t mean it was auto enabled in the Linux system it was plugged into. Often times Linux can’t tell if an adapter or drive enclosure has TRIM support so the safe thing to do is to not enable it by default. That means you can see the drive supports TRIM, hdparm says the drive supports TRIM, yet when you run fstrim it still complains that TRIM isn’t supported.

Take a look at

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Solid_state_drive#External_SSD_with_TRIM_support

and https://glump.net/howto/desktop/enable-trim-on-an-external-ssd-on-linux

If you already have an external adapter or enclosure that claims TRIM support but it isn’t working in Linux maybe try to enable TRIM and see how it goes?

For what it’s worth I do have a drive enclosure, with ASMedia ASM1351 chipset, that claims TRIM and UASP support but by default fstrim still won’t run TRIM on any drives inside it. If I get some free time maybe I’ll see if I can get Debian to enable TRIM on the device just for testing but it could be a bit.

EDIT: Confirmed the instructions in archlinux seem to work and I was able to temporarily enable TRIM on my external drive enclosure to successfully run fstrim on an SSD inside it. I only did a quick test, setting provisioning_mode to “unmap” so it’ll lose TRIM configuration once I disconnect the drive or restart the system. You’ll probably want to go the extra step and set up udev rules to keep it enabled.

Tested on Debian with a Startech S251BMU313 (USB 3.1 enclosure for 2.5" SATA drives with ASMedia ASM1351 chipset). In theory the archlinux instructions should work with any external USB adapter or enclosure with TRIM support.

Also note the instructions are a bit confusing, I did notice that running sg_readcap immediately resets the configuration in provisioning_mode so in my case I had to avoid re-running sg_readcap after enabling “unmap”.

EDIT2: Forgot one important tidbit :P for whatever reason the actual echo “unmap” command in archlinux would not work for me, I think you may need to have root permissions to actually do that? Instead I ran this with my non-root admin user:

echo unmap | sudo tee /sys/block/sdX/device/scsi_disk/*/provisioning_mode

Replace sdX with the drive device you’re working with. I’m not entirely sure why the above command works for me in Debian, and not the archlinux version, but figured I’d document it here just in case.

That’s good info! I’ve been looking around for a PATA to USB adapter with SMART support and haven’t had a ton of luck narrowing one down. Thinking offhand I may need to cobble together a PATA-to-SATA adapter connected to a SATA-to-USB adapter to actually get some SMART info moving from a PATA drive via USB. It’s not the only way to do this but it would be a lot easier if it can be done via USB :/

Also some fun info since you mentioned PATA adapters - The Maxtor OneTouch II is a terrible ATA enclosure, especially on Linux. For whatever reason the built-in chipset does some sort of disconnect right at the end of long operations like formatting, partitioning, etc. so you’re never entirely sure if the command worked correctly. I guess it was designed with Windows in mind, or maybe its Linux compatibility isn’t 100% there. And of course no SMART info gets passed through.

Right now using a pfSense router, it’s been working well but I’ll eventually replace it with hardware to run OPNsense (pfSense fork) when the time comes.

If you’re mainly just worried about wireless I’d just look into something to run OpenWrt or maybe FreshTomato if you’re sticking to older hardware. I have an older Linksys wireless router that is compatible with FreshTomato firmware so it’s been running on that and works well for my own usage, nothing fancy.