Would adding a solid state drive speed up projects, since the slows thing on my computer is the hard drive. I just happen to have a 250 gig ssd.
thanks
Brad

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Red pill or Blue pill? How do you Know the real world from the dream world? The world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth! Welcome to The Real World!!! Welcome to The Real World!!! I Want to Believe. BRAD

Most projects aren't disk intensive, so a faster disk subsystem isn't necessarily going to speed up much. In fact, since BOINC's checkpointing can be relatively disk intensive with a bunch of small writes, and most SSDs have a limited write lifecycle, BOINC can actually shorten the lifespan of your SSD.

I have two SSDs RAID'd in my system, but I put BOINC on my mechanical D: drive instead.

Thanks for the info! Had not thought about the life cycle. Would it be good for video editing?
Just a thought I bought it cheap on ebay and was looking to improve the performance of my machine disk wise,

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Red pill or Blue pill? How do you Know the real world from the dream world? The world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth! Welcome to The Real World!!! Welcome to The Real World!!! I Want to Believe. BRAD

What is the best use of the SSD?

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Red pill or Blue pill? How do you Know the real world from the dream world? The world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth! Welcome to The Real World!!! Welcome to The Real World!!! I Want to Believe. BRAD

What is the best use of the SSD?

Install the operating system and programs on it to speed up the system and also use it for any I/O intensive stuff (like video editing for example).

As for BOINC usage, it won't help much, specially not for SETI as it is not I/O intensive. It might help a bit in case of projects like Rosetta, which unpacks lots of files from a zip file each time it starts a new WU, but that's also just 2-3 seconds and than the WU runs for several hours without any noteworthy HDD load. I don't know wether there are any really I/O intensive BOINC projects, such projects might indeed benefit from a SSD. But in generall, as long as you don't see the HDD LED being on for longer periods of time when using HDD, you won't see any speed up for BOINC.

If you are worried about shortening the lifespan of the SSD, you can increase the checkpoint interval a bit. OTOH, tests have shown, that SSDs are not so sensitive to writes as many people think.

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I'm sure it depends on the SSD. I have a Samsung 830 Series 256GB that at the time was best with large file transfers. Something I 've rarely used it for since anything worth storing is on a separate 750 Seagate 7200rpm'er. This 830 though has been half full, including OS for two years now with no problems but more important it still boots in 16-18 seconds, KNOCKS WOOD. A good place to compare current SSD's is Tom's Hardware and click on the charts tab at the top of the page. I know a link would help but I can never get the dang thing to post.

Regards

Thanks for the info! Had not thought about the life cycle. Would it be good for video editing?

SSDs are great for speeding up disk-intensive stuff like video editing, gaming, booting the OS (not sure how often people do that these days, but it cuts down on reboots).

OTOH, tests have shown, that SSDs are not so sensitive to writes as many people think.

There's a caveat to that statement that lies in between the general warning I gave and your statement here.

SSDs only consider a "write" for any bit change. If you copy over a file and only one bit changes, only that bit's life has reduced. Overall, SSDs aren't any more susceptible to drive failures any more than standard mechanical drives, but offer exponentially more speed, less electricity usage, and less of a chance of losing your data due to rough G force shock (dropping the drive or laptop if applicable).

Perhaps my warning came off as a bit scarier than intended, but it still something to keep in mind that all things fail.

keep in mind that all things fail.

Yes. But I often had the impression, that once SSDs came out, many people forgot, that HDDs may fail too (that were pretty much the same people, who always complained about the short lifespan of HDDs before the SSDs came out).

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Perhaps my warning came off as a bit scarier than intended, but it still something to keep in mind that all things fail.

Well I'd rather have my backed-up spinning data drive fail than my SSD OS boot drive and have to go through hours and hours of reinstall and config.

So, thanks for the reminder as I wanted to move the BOINC data folder for a long time... if anyone wants to it's very easy and takes all of a minute:

Have the BOINC installer handy.
Browse to the data folder. For Windows 7 its default location is C:\Users\All Users\BOINC
Quit BOINC. I know this is terrifying, but it has to happen sometimes, right? ;^)
Move the entire BOINC data folder to the destination. If you get any errors that file(s) are in use go into Task Manager->Processes and kill any boinc*.* processes. Or just Copy and you can delete the old one later.
Uninstall BOINC from the Control Panel->Programs.
Launch the BOINC installer.
Make sure to click the Advanced button on the panel with the folders and checkboxes, then set the Program directory to the BOINC folder you just moved.
Complete the install keeping all other settings default and you should see all your projects and work as they were.

Note: You have to do the uninstall/reinstall or the permissions will be wrong and all work units will fail. Thanks to Ageless for figuring out these steps.

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If you are worried about shortening the lifespan of the SSD, you can increase the checkpoint interval a bit. OTOH, tests have shown, that SSDs are not so sensitive to writes as many people think.

Tech Report have been running some consumer SSDs to see just how much they can take till they fail.
600TB so far and no failures (That's 300GB per day, every day, for 5 years), it's actually looking like the first drive to fail will do so after around 1PB of writes.
SSD endurance test.

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Grant
Darwin NT

Well I'd rather have my backed-up spinning data drive fail than my SSD OS boot drive and have to go through hours and hours of reinstall and config.

You can backup the OS drive too, than if it fails you'll just have to install what you installed after the backup.

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Make sure to click the Advanced button on the panel with the folders and checkboxes, then set the Program directory to the BOINC folder you just moved.

Egads... you know you're getting old when you think one thing when typing and something else appears. It's the Data directory! :^p Hope that mistake was obvious to anyone following it!

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I love my SSD. They are getting better at spreading out the writes over the entire disk so now the bigger the disk the longer they can last; defragging is not necessary, in fact it is harmful. I have been using them for ten months and they still show 100%. That is another thing I like about them, they show how much life they have left.

Alas for SETI an SSD will not help. The secret to crunching SETI is GPUs.

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That is another thing I like about them, they show how much life they have left.

Mechanical hard drives have had that ability for years through Self Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology; S.M.A.R.T. The problem with these kinds of tools is that they're usually best guesses. They can sometimes give off false-positives (though rare), or sometimes fail to report a true failure that would indicate impending doom (far worse, and happens more often than you would hope).

That is another thing I like about them, they show how much life they have left.

Mechanical hard drives have had that ability for years through Self Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology; S.M.A.R.T.

My understanding is SSD have a known number of writes and when that number is reached it is the end. With no moving parts there is not much else to fail.

One brand had a reputation of failing after one and a half years no matter how much it was used. The problem was a write to the same spot every hour when the computer was on. A firmware update brought all the dead drives back to life.

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That is another thing I like about them, they show how much life they have left.

Mechanical hard drives have had that ability for years through Self Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology; S.M.A.R.T.

My understanding is SSD have a known number of writes and when that number is reached it is the end. With no moving parts there is not much else to fail.

Right. And as I stated earlier, it is only considered a "write" if the bit actually changes.

One brand had a reputation of failing after one and a half years no matter how much it was used. The problem was a write to the same spot every hour when the computer was on. A firmware update brought all the dead drives back to life.

Our company purchased a 512GB OCZ SSD for a particular user who was running out of space on his 320GB mechanical. After imaging this drive with our corporate edition of Windows 7 the drive repeatedly failed to boot after POST unless you inserted a flash drive into a USB slot, then selected to boot off the SSD.

It wasn't a diskpart error either... the MBR simply refused to present itself as bootable unless another drive was plugged in. After contacting OCZ they admitted this was a problem with their firmware but they recently filed for bankruptcy and refused to fix it since we hadn't purchased a large number of drives.

One brand had a reputation of failing after one and a half years no matter how much it was used. The problem was a write to the same spot every hour when the computer was on. A firmware update brought all the dead drives back to life.

Our company purchased a 512GB OCZ SSD for a particular user who was running out of space on his 320GB mechanical. After imaging this drive with our corporate edition of Windows 7 the drive repeatedly failed to boot after POST unless you inserted a flash drive into a USB slot, then selected to boot off the SSD

I bought an OCZ drive last year when the drive in my XP machine died. Never got it to work reliably. Finally realised that the disk was SATA III, backward compatible with SATA II ... and that my motherboard was old enough to actually be SATA I!

It wasn't a diskpart error either... the MBR simply refused to present itself as bootable unless another drive was plugged in. After contacting OCZ they admitted this was a problem with their firmware but they recently filed for bankruptcy and refused to fix it since we hadn't purchased a large number of drives.

OCZ have now been bought by Toshiba.

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