I was thinking perhaps a dedicated machine with perhaps a load of HDDs in it.
Curious if anyone has an idea on how to efficiently mass seed.
Why are you trying to mass seed popular torrents? You’ll just wind up splitting your bandwidth per torrent so much that people will go to other seeders. If you do less popular torrents you may get less activity but you’ll seed a higher percentage each time and probably be doing more of a service.
Not OP, but this is solid advice that I never would have considered
Private tracker and seed requirements is the reason that comes to mind for me. Back when I was on a private tracker some 20 years ago I would get the torrent file and the actual data from a friend so I could seed it without having downloaded it.
Yeah, but you’re gonna be competing with all the fastest seeders with popular torrents on private trackers from my experience so you probably won’t get much of any upload credit until the hype dies down. If you need the credit and have the file already somehow I would even suggest bringing a torrent back from the dead that has a leecher or two trying to download.
Your question is so generic that it is difficult to reply. I’ll tell you about my use case then so that you can try to figure out yours.
My goal is to be a respectful citizen. I divide my torrents in three categories:
- rare stuff: for example project 4k77 or the John Wick regrades or Rashomon
- italian stuff: it can be either popular stuff and also rare stuff; italian content is not seeded much so I need to do my part
- common/popular stuff: for example the barbie movie or every marvel stuff
I bought tons of space (recently converted to three drives, 20tb each) and use a virtual machine locked behind a vpn. Even if I forget to paid, the virtual machine is bind to the tunnel so that traffic doesn’t go out except for LAN, so no leaks.
The VM has two torrent client:
- qbittorrent: seed the torrents in the common / popular categories, speed capped to 1/3 of my bandwidth
- transmission (previously using rtorrent) for the other two categories
I tend to leave everything in transmission seeded forever, the stuff in qbittorrent seeded until 2.5 ratio or 4.0 depending on my mood.
At the moment I have 90.2 ration on transmission and many many many TB of uploaded stuff. That should be enough to feel like you are giving back
You can do the same with just 3 containers: qBittorrent, qbit manage, and some VPN. You will be saving a ton of resources while having more granular control over how you handle the seeding. That’s what I have :)
A seedbox might work for your needs. However they come with a monthly cost.
You want a server. I imagine an unraid server given your description.
