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A quick note before getting into it: this post was previously lost and later restored on January 17, 2022.

Why I gave up on the earlier setup

I had been using Aria2 with a web interface for PT downloads, but managing torrents that way was genuinely frustrating. The biggest annoyance was simple: deleting a task would not also remove the related files.

That said, Aria2 was not without strengths. It was extremely fast at finding peers, and its download speed could usually be pushed very close to the maximum. I only appreciated that even more after comparing it with Transmission, though I still do not really know why the difference was so obvious.

Because of those management problems, I switched back and spent more time on Transmission. I got the permissions sorted out and downloads were working, but the overall performance never felt right. The speed just would not ramp up properly, and uploading was not very active either. That was hard to accept.

My home connection already sits in what feels like a huge local network on China Mobile broadband, so if peer discovery is weak and uploading is sluggish, the whole PT experience becomes a lot less usable.

So I kept looking for something better.

Installing qBittorrent on a Raspberry Pi

At first I completely overlooked qBittorrent. The name did not stand out to me, and I had not seen it highlighted anywhere as a recommended option. Later I saw people mention it in a forum thread, and that finally pushed me to check it out.

Once I looked it up, the answer was obvious: it supports ARM, so it works on a Raspberry Pi. Then I found the installation instructions and was honestly surprised by how short they were. Just two commands.

  1. Install
   sudo apt-get install qbittorrent-nox
  1. Start it
   qbittorrent-nox -d
   #端口号默认是8080
   #如果想要自定端口的话，请输入以下命令
   qbittorrent-nox --webui-port=8081 -d
  1. Open the web interface
   你树莓派的ip:8080

image

After all that trial and error, I really did not expect the simplest option to be the one that worked best.

What it was like to use

After a few days with qBittorrent, I was satisfied with it overall. In terms of torrent management, it may be a little weaker than Transmission in some respects, but it is already more than good enough in practice. The settings are also laid out clearly, which makes it easy to work with.

Three things stood out in particular:

  1. When deleting a task, you can choose to delete the related files at the same time. That alone makes file management much easier.
  2. The category feature lets you assign a separate save path to each category. If you choose the right category when creating a task, the files are basically organized from the start. It can also be used to move files around. For example, if you add a new hard drive and want to relocate data, changing the category path works almost like a cut-and-move operation.
  3. You can configure speed limits by time period. For example, you can set throttling from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. so the client does not eat too much bandwidth during the hours when people are actually using the internet normally.

At this point, I think qBittorrent is the most suitable BT/PT downloader for ARM devices.

The interface is also clean and organized, which matters more than it sounds.

A bit of hardware to go with it

To make the Raspberry Pi setup more practical, I also picked up a UGREEN hard drive dock and a second-hand 2 TB HGST drive for 225 yuan. This is very much a just-for-fun setup, so I am not storing anything important on it.

The dock was 118 yuan during a promotion, and in general I think some of UGREEN's gear is pretty decent.

If you are into this kind of setup too, there is definitely a lot to talk about.

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