What's better - torrents or DDLs?

[Ruyzan]

same goes for DDLS if you have no premium account mostly after 30 days you have to reupload it again with low speed will take lots of hours no even days

 

[4040287]

without premium DDLs is really painful,So i prefer Torrent.

 

[solomon]

Cant said what is the best :D if file is very hot ~> torrent is best, but if old file ~> torrent like shit :( ddl is best in this case. I think

 

[Zane]

Direct Downloads forever ever FTW :D

 

[Nethecite]

DDL is more reliable for me. I agree with earlier posters that I hate, hate, HATE when a torrent sticks at 99%. I've used a number of premium DDL sites for years and loved them.

I'm also ancient enough to still use USENET, which is still my preferred DL method, but it wasn't included in the poll, so....

 

[n3k0]

Torrents are much better for those without a premium account.
-No waiting
-No capped speeds
-No having to download parts and have to wait even longer in between each one
-No CAPTCHA

Also I can set torrents to go on overnight, but since there's a CAPTCHA on some DDL I have to wait for it to start instead of just setting a list, going to sleep, and waking with new stuff ready in the morning while I eat cereal. If you have a premium though, these downsides are mitigated, but you still have to hope you have premium for the host DDL sites use and also have to consider how fast the DDL host takes things down.

 

[Mahoro]

Torrents, no question for me. I grew up having to share a cable connection with my dad and got maybe 0.5-1kb/s on a good day for download speed. There is NO WAY that could sustain using DDL, they'd simply just time out. Torrents on the other hand, I downloaded FMP over the span of an entire year (yes, I was that insane before), and other than the computer crashing occasionally, I got the download in one try.

Nowadays after I have speeds of about 600x that now (I'm still not entirely used to the speed, lol), I still prefer torrents unless the uploader using mediafire, sendspace, megaupload (can be automated) or actually of all things now, rapidshare. I'm surely not alone thinking that those other filehosts just use captcha as a hostage taking measure, there is NO reason at all they need to use them, captchas were meant as an anti-spam measure, and a downloading hoster service is just asking for people to want to use them anyway...thats the point of them. And parts...theres no way the parts need to be split into only 100mb parts...thats just screaming profit mongerer... I despise some of those hosts with asanine times like filepost...who the hell wants to wait an HOUR AND A HALF between files, I may as well go buy the damn thing then, it would be faster, lol. Now that said, I begrudgingly put up with those filehosts as it seems thats the only way to get newer things under 3-4gb. What I do is use jdownloader with as many different hosts as possible, and only let one batch of them run at a time, so I don't come back to them until at all until after the timeout period is reset.

Yes, it does probably take just as long as torrents, if not longer to do it this way you may have guessed. But at least I A) don't need to keep track of them and B) not have incessent task breaking notices of "enter the recaptcha" BS. I'll still take torrents any day of the week.

 

[deadheall17]

direct link is faster but torrent is long life o7

 

[corocoro]

100MB parts are gay. >_>

 

[nr345]

100MB parts are gay. >_>

Absolutely right :D They're just makes an additional crowd in your NTFS...

 

[Aoyagi]

Torrent,100% chance to avoid dead links *see it seeder First though~

Continue DL everywhere,in case you're using portable one :3

 

[Hideki]

Good speed at my connection so i chose torrents.
not a problem to download blue-ray formats around 30-min

 

[Maverick007]

Depends on the situation. I usually use DDLs for smaller files and torrents for bigger ones.
Torrents I average higher speeds, but of course are limited to seeds. So it all depends on the file and how old the torrent is.

 

[MoreDeath-11]

If I was your network admin... well... whoever uses torrents would be nuked almost instantly...

Please do DDL :P

 

[Mahoro]

Thats a pretty fail network admin if you only checked for excessive traffic via torrents :p

They check http here too just as much at uni (only on the student wireless, the work wired one I dont think they care lol)

 

[corocoro]

Thats a pretty fail network admin if you only checked for excessive traffic via torrents :p

They check http here too just as much at uni (only on the student wireless, the work wired one I dont think they care lol)

Overhead, not to mention data transferred, are a lot lower with DDL. If you're on a small network, you can easily achieve ratios over 10 before the download finishes - meaning 11 times (and more) the traffic caused.
And yes, I assume the average user doesn't throttle his torrent client, especially when on a work/university line where there are no noticeable slow-downs.

 

[Mahoro]

but then I don't care about data xfered at home, my ISP doesn't care. ^^;

And its not really any differnet than the ddl situation though is it? 1x upload by original person + (1x upload to each person/download from that same one), its just more people split the torrent load. (Sorry if I'm not entirely making coherent sentences, I'm sort of half awake right now xD)

 

[corocoro]

No, it's not - people with faster connections upload disproportionately much. Since the kind of places that need network administrators tend to be those with fast speeds, the burden is a lot heavier on them than it is one Bob the Home User and his 56K modem.

 

[Hideki]

I think its easier to browse files you're looking after to (specified) and the torrents are often complete... depending on the site too... you can see if the torrent is trustworthy or not... AND you can just realx while downloading a torrent instead of keeping an eye on the seperate file download which you must actively change for completion of a whole file set.

 

[Ero-Neko]

when i have Premium account is vote for DDL, but with lager file >3GB is torrent is bester

 

[MoreDeath-11]

but then I don't care about data xfered at home, my ISP doesn't care. ^^;

If you're paying for each bit transmitted, torrent does have indeed a heavy overhead. And overhead is traffic you don't access. And as far as an ISP side of things go, if you transmit that many TCP packets via my network, well, I can throttle it down for you. However if you do everything via UTP, I'll just start randomly dropping your UDP packets... And that's going to affect your VoIP if you use it.

Please do remember you're on a shared connection if you have a residential line. It doesn't matter weather you're on xDSL or Cable, it is all shared because your ISP makes money by hoping that you only use the line approximately 10-15% of the time. Don't like it? Get a dedicated line from me and I'll let you do whatever the hell you want with the line and the price for such dedicated line isn't going to come cheap.

 

[Shirakawa2Hojo]

Definitely torrent. Pretty useful when downloading stuff more than 2 GB and you don't need to worry about it once it starts downloading. DDL's are hard to download because the rar might get corrupted while downloading. A lot of wasted time in my part. :)