Seedbox and Storage Box Resource Tiers

Every Pulsed Media plan publishes the exact numbers behind its performance: how many CPU cores it can use, its CPU and disk priority weights, its RAM, its monthly traffic, and its RAID level. Nothing is hidden behind "premium" or "turbo" labels. This page explains what each of those numbers means for you, and lists them per plan so you can compare before you buy.

The short version: the tier labels (Archive, Standard, Performance, High; formerly shown as Glacial, Low, Medium, High) are marketing names for a real systemd number. On shared hardware, that number decides your share of a resource only when the hardware is genuinely contended. When it is idle, you get everything it can give, regardless of tier.

What this means for you

A seedbox or storage box shares physical hardware with other accounts. Two things follow from that, and they are the same two things whether we are talking about CPU or disk:

When the resource is not busy, your tier does not matter. If nobody else is using the CPU or the disk at that instant, you get all of it. The scheduler is work-conserving: it never idles capacity while there is work to do.
Your tier decides your share only during contention — the moments when several accounts want the same CPU or the same disk at the same instant. Then the priority weight splits the resource in proportion. A higher weight gets a bigger slice; a lower weight gets a smaller one. Once the burst clears, everyone goes back to taking as much as they need.

A higher tier does not raise your ceiling on a quiet machine. There is no more to give — you already have it all. It protects your responsiveness when the machine is fought over.

The resource dimensions

RAID level

RAID is how your data is laid out across physical drives. Two levels appear on our plans:

RAID5 — data plus parity striped across the drives. One drive can fail completely and your data stays intact while we replace it. This is the default for seedbox and storage plans. RAID is not a backup — it protects against drive failure, not against deletion.
RAID0 — data striped across drives for maximum speed, with no redundancy. One drive failure loses the array. We use RAID0 only on the SSD Seedbox tier, where the point is raw speed and it is best treated as fast scratch space, not a vault.

For the tradeoffs in depth, see RAID.

CPU cores and CPU priority

Two separate numbers describe your processor share:

CPU cores — how many processor cores your box can spread work across. A 4-core box can run four things at full tilt in parallel; a 0.5-core storage box is sized for light background work, not transcoding.
CPU priority — a weight on the systemd 1 to 10000 scale (the default is 100). It works exactly like disk priority: it only matters when the CPU is contended, and then it splits CPU time in proportion to the weight. The tier labels map to real weights:

Tier	CPU weight	Meaning
Archive / Standard	100	Baseline share. Fine for storage and light background work.
Performance	500	Five times the baseline share under contention. The active-seedbox default.
High	1000	Ten times the baseline share. The top seedbox tier.

I/O (disk) priority

Disk priority is a weight on the same idea, applied to disk bandwidth instead of CPU time. When several accounts hit the same platters at once, the weight splits the disk between them; when the disk is quiet, you get the whole thing. Storage boxes sit at an Archive weight (a small share under contention, which is why they are cheap and background-class); active seedboxes sit higher.

This is the one dimension with a long story underneath it, including an upstream kernel bug we work around to make tiered disk priority actually function. That detail lives on its own page: Seedbox and Storage Box Disk Priority.

RAM

The memory your box can use before the system starts reclaiming it. A 4 GB seedbox comfortably runs a full media stack; a 250 MB storage box is sized for file serving, not for running applications.

Network speed and traffic

Network speed — the port your box connects at, either 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps. This is the peak rate, shared like everything else.
Monthly traffic — how much data you can move per calendar month. Active seedboxes carry large allowances (10 TB and up); storage boxes carry smaller ones because they are for holding data, not constantly moving it.

Per-plan reference

The exact numbers for the current Eternal Väinämöinen plans. Storage boxes share one background-class profile; seedboxes climb the tiers.

Plan	RAID	CPU cores	CPU priority	I/O priority	RAM	Network	Traffic / month
Storage 1TB / 2TB	RAID5	0.5	Archive (100)	Archive (2)	250 MB	10 Gbps	250 GB
Storage 2TB (1G)	RAID5	0.5	Archive (100)	Archive (2)	250 MB	1 Gbps	250 GB
Storage 4TB	RAID5	1	Standard (100)	Archive (4)	250 MB	10 Gbps	250 GB
Seedbox 1TB	RAID5	2	Performance (500)	Standard (100)	1 GB	10 Gbps	10 TB
SSD Seedbox 0.5TB	RAID0	4	Performance (500)	Standard (100)	2 GB	10 Gbps	10 TB
Seedbox 8TB	RAID5	4	High (1000)	Performance (300)	4 GB	10 Gbps	20 TB

Storage boxes are deliberately background-class: cheap, large, and content to wait their turn when the disk is busy. Seedboxes pay for a bigger share of CPU and disk under contention, more cores, and more RAM. If you are running a media stack or racing a private tracker, that difference is what you are buying.

Verify it yourself

We publish these numbers rather than hide them because you can check them. The disk priority weights are enforced by the mechanism documented on the Seedbox and Storage Box Disk Priority page, and the platform that sets them, PMSS, is open source. If your box is not performing the way its tier says it should when the hardware is quiet, that is a fault to report, not a limit of your plan.