Interesting idea raised by "..." .

Has anyone ever done this? Would the number crunching be faster than having BOINC installed on your harddrive?

If there is a current thread on this, sorry for duplicate thread, could you post a link?

That is something I'd like to test !!

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Please note that USB sticks have a limited number of write cycles. Running any BOINC project directly from a stick isn't a good idea. Instead you should have a look at ramdrives. Combining these two techniques could be interesting...

None of these will make your crunching faster - all they will allow you to do is to make your harddrives spin down and produce less noise (and consume less power; produce less heat).

Tried it briefly a few months ago on a friends machine with a 128Mb USB stick, worked without problems.

Although I would agree with what Janus said about the limited amount of write cycles on the flash memory used in USB sticks, the one I tried worked for about a week with no obvious problem to either data crunched or the stick itself which still works fine (in a much more boring role as part of a "sneaker-net").

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> Please note that USB sticks have a limited number of write cycles. Running any
> BOINC project directly from a stick isn't a good idea. Instead you should have
> a look at ramdrives. Combining these two techniques could be interesting...
>
> None of these will make your crunching faster - all they will allow you to do
> is to make your harddrives spin down and produce less noise (and consume less
> power; produce less heat).
>

OFF-TOPIC:
Hey Janus, can you fix the message boards so they will jump to the edit box when replying to a post? It's a bit, uuh, annoying having to scroll down by hand. Just a thought.... >:-)
ON-TOPIC;

No comments on the topic, sorry.... >:-(

L8R....

T'Khasi Time: Sunday, 27 February 2005 - 07:56 PM --800 (Pacific Standard Time)

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CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr - L L & P _\\//
Winders 11 OS? "What a piece of junk!" - L. Skywalker
"Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide." - T'Plana-hath

>BOINC on a USB key
what exactly do you mean?

having the boinc folder only on the USB drive OR
having the full OS including the boinc folder?

Last year I tested a win98se including the boinc folder
starting not from an USB but from a compact flash drive.

It worked fine from a 128 MB CF and also from an old 340 MB micro drive.

Since last Friday running 2 clients with ramdisks, this ramdisk (about 80 mb)
carries the full boinc folder (Einstein and LHC attached).

This ramdisk offers a periodic save to harddisk of the ramdisk-image.
every 15 Minutes the save is done.

So far, it look great.
I did it to reduce the overall hd access, so the harddisk sleeps.

At seti@classic, was using only ramdisks, from m$ and from the *nix(lpr) based clients.


You can get the ramdisk from here :

> This ramdisk offers a periodic save to harddisk of the ramdisk-image.
> every 15 Minutes the save is done.
>
> So far, it look great.
> I did it to reduce the overall hd access, so the harddisk sleeps.
>
I think spinning the harddrive up and down every 15 minutes isn't going to make much of a difference in power usage, and it will also make the life of the drive MUCH shorter.

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>I think spinning the harddrive up and down every 15 minutes isn't going to >make much of a difference in power usage, and it will also make the life of >the drive MUCH shorter.

Don't think, just look at the harddisk technical sheet.;-)

Modern HD are build for that.

then you know what the fact is....

The maingain is the quiteness

Seeing your stats, I'm doing your total from all project in less that one day,
*G* so I guess I watch more my experience than what other are thinking...