Pulsed Media 10Gbps Seedbox

A 10Gbps seedbox is a seedbox whose server is connected to the datacenter network at 10 gigabits per second. At that speed the theoretical maximum throughput is roughly 1.25 GB/s — fast enough to fill a 50GB drive in under a minute if peers can sustain it.

For most casual users the difference between 1Gbps and 10Gbps is invisible. For private tracker racing, large simultaneous transfers, or running a media server library measured in tens of terabytes, it is the difference between keeping up and not keeping up.

Pulsed Media offers two 10Gbps shared seedbox lines: V10G (RAID0) and M10G (RAID5). Both run on the same PM Software Stack and offer the same torrent client choices. The difference is in the storage layer.

1Gbps vs 10Gbps: what actually changes

A 1Gbps connection tops out at about 125 MB/s. That is fast enough for one or two concurrent heavy transfers. A 10Gbps connection tops out at about 1.25 GB/s. That headroom matters when multiple things compete for bandwidth at the same time: seeding dozens of active torrents, a remote SFTP pull, and a Plex transcode all hitting the network simultaneously.

Scenario	1Gbps (V1000 / M1000)	10Gbps (V10G / M10G)
Single file download (full speed, peers willing)	up to ~125 MB/s	up to ~1,250 MB/s
SFTP pull to local machine	limited by 1Gbps (unless your ISP is faster)	limited by your local connection, not the seedbox
Simultaneous torrents seeding at full speed	bandwidth shared across all active torrents	much larger pool before contention
Private tracker race (initial seed)	competitive on smaller files	competitive on large files too
Plex / Jellyfin remote streams (multiple users)	sufficient for a few concurrent 4K streams	sufficient for many concurrent streams

The 1Gbps plans are not slow. For a single user downloading and seeding a moderate torrent load they are more than adequate. The 10Gbps plans exist for the cases where 125 MB/s becomes the bottleneck.

Note that on shared plans, the 10Gbps is the server's uplink, not a dedicated allocation per user. You share the link with other users on the same server. Pulsed Media keeps server density low enough that the shared uplink does not become a bottleneck under normal conditions. When everyone is seeding simultaneously the 10Gbps pipe provides a substantially larger budget than a 1Gbps pipe would.

V10G vs M10G: choosing a RAID level

Both plans use 10Gbps network. The difference is in how the storage array is built.

	V10G	M10G
RAID level	RAID0 (striped)	RAID5 (striped with parity)
Drive failure tolerance	None. One drive fails, data is lost.	One drive can fail. Array rebuilds on a spare.
Write performance	Maximum — no parity calculation overhead	Slightly lower writes due to parity
Read performance	Maximum	Comparable to RAID0 at most workloads
Best for	Maximum throughput, data you can re-download	Data that is inconvenient or impossible to replace

V10G (RAID0) is the right choice if you are primarily downloading from trackers and seeding back. If a drive fails you lose the data on the server, but you can re-download most torrent content. The lack of parity overhead means every I/O operation goes directly to disk at maximum speed.

M10G (RAID5) is the right choice if you have media libraries, backups, or curated content on the server that would be painful to rebuild from scratch. The RAID5 parity protects against a single drive failure. In practice, write throughput on M10G is still fast enough that it does not create a bottleneck for normal torrent seeding.

Neither plan is "better." They serve different risk tolerances. If you are unsure: if you would be annoyed but not devastated by losing the data, V10G is fine. If losing the data would cause real problems, M10G is the safer option.

Private tracker racing at 10Gbps

Racing on private trackers means being among the first users to seed a new torrent. The tracker rewards early seeders with better upload credit because they are the only source for other downloaders. Being early requires downloading the torrent quickly and having enough outbound bandwidth to serve many leechers simultaneously.

A 1Gbps uplink caps the outbound seeding at ~125 MB/s. Divided across twenty leechers downloading simultaneously, each gets about 6 MB/s. On a 10Gbps uplink, the same twenty leechers could each get 60 MB/s -- if the disks can sustain it and if the leechers can absorb it.

For small torrents (under a few gigabytes), 1Gbps is often fast enough to be competitive. The bottleneck is usually how quickly the file downloads first, not how fast it can be seeded out. For large torrents -- multi-gigabyte movie remuxes, season packs, software releases -- the 10Gbps uplink makes a measurable difference in how many peers you can serve simultaneously in the critical first minutes.

The download side matters equally. On a 10Gbps server, if the content source has enough seeders, the initial download completes significantly faster, which means seeding starts sooner. This compound advantage (faster download, larger seeding capacity) is why racing-focused users prefer 10Gbps plans.

rTorrent and ruTorrent are the default torrent clients on all PM plans and are widely supported on private trackers. qBittorrent and Deluge are also available through the PM Software Stack. See RTorrent vs qBittorrent vs Deluge for a comparison.

Media streaming at 10Gbps

Running Plex or Jellyfin on a seedbox means the media server is in the datacenter, not at home. Streams travel from the seedbox over the internet to your client device. The seedbox's outbound bandwidth becomes the constraint on how many concurrent streams you can serve.

A single 4K Blu-ray remux stream can require 60-120 Mbps if served without transcoding (direct play). At 1Gbps that allows for roughly 8-16 simultaneous direct-play 4K streams before the uplink saturates. At 10Gbps the headroom is substantially larger.

In practice, most Plex and Jellyfin setups do not hit the network limit on either plan. The more common limits are CPU (transcoding is expensive), disk read speed (many concurrent streams reading different files), and your clients' download connections at home.

Where 10Gbps makes a concrete difference for media streaming: if you share access with several people, if you serve high-bitrate content without transcoding, or if the seedbox is also actively seeding many torrents while the media server is running.

Network and datacenter

Pulsed Media's datacenters are in Finland -- Helsinki and Kerava. Finland has strong international connectivity to the rest of Europe. The major European internet exchanges are reachable with low latency from Helsinki, which means transfers to and from most European countries are fast and direct.

For users in Europe: the network path from a Finnish seedbox to a home connection in Germany, the Netherlands, or the UK is typically short and well-peered. For users in North America or Asia: latency is higher (Helsinki to the US East Coast is roughly 100-130ms), but this only affects interactive SSH sessions. Large file transfers via SFTP or rclone are unaffected by latency -- throughput is what matters, and that is determined by available bandwidth.

The 10Gbps uplink means the seedbox side of the transfer will not be the bottleneck. Your local connection speed and the route between Finland and your location determine actual SFTP transfer rates.

Transferring files from a 10Gbps seedbox

A 10Gbps seedbox is only useful if you can retrieve the files efficiently. See Seedbox access via FTP, SSH and SFTP for the full setup guide. The practical options:

SFTP is the simplest method. Any SFTP client (FileZilla, WinSCP, Cyberduck) connects over SSH and transfers files. Single-stream SFTP typically tops out at 200-400 MB/s depending on CPU crypto overhead. For most home connections this is irrelevant -- a 1Gbps home connection receives at ~125 MB/s maximum, so single-stream SFTP already saturates it.

lftp with multi-segment transfers can push past single-stream limits by opening several parallel connections:

<syntaxhighlight lang="bash"> lftp -e "mirror --parallel=5 --use-pget-n=5 /remote/path /local/path" sftp://user@server.pulsedmedia.com </syntaxhighlight>

This is useful if your home connection supports speeds above what a single SFTP stream can deliver.

rclone works well for syncing large directories, scheduling transfers, or moving files directly from the seedbox to cloud storage (Google Drive, S3, Backblaze B2) without going through your local machine at all. Because rclone runs on the seedbox server, it uses the 10Gbps uplink to reach cloud storage directly. This can move hundreds of gigabytes to cloud storage in minutes.

The PM web file manager provides browser-based access for smaller transfers without any client software. It is not suitable for bulk transfers of large files but is convenient for occasional downloads.

When to upgrade from 1Gbps

A 10Gbps plan is worth the additional cost in these situations:

You race on private trackers and the torrent content is large enough that 1Gbps becomes the bottleneck during the race window.
You run a shared Plex or Jellyfin server with multiple concurrent high-bitrate streams.
You pull files to a local machine with a connection faster than 1Gbps and currently wait on the seedbox side.
You use rclone to move data from the seedbox to cloud storage and the transfer time matters.
You seed many active torrents simultaneously and the 1Gbps uplink has become a constraint.

A 1Gbps plan is sufficient if:

You download a moderate number of torrents and seed them at whatever rate peers request.
You are the only person streaming from the server and not doing it at extremely high bitrates.
Your home internet connection is below 1Gbps -- in that case upgrading the seedbox plan will not change your local download speed.
You do not race on private trackers.

The upgrade from 1Gbps to 10Gbps does not change the software, interface, or torrent client configuration. Everything on the PM Software Stack works the same way. You get more headroom.