Is using a 16GB 3.0 flash drive a viable alternative for running Boinic projects or will it just make the lifespan of the flash drive shorter?

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I have an ssd external drive hooked up to my laptop since I don't want to burn out the build in SSD drive with all the writing/rewriting that Seti does.

Is using a 16GB 3.0 flash drive a viable alternative for running Boinic projects or will it just make the lifespan of the flash drive shorter?

Any quality flash drive will have decent wear levelling. Assuming you don't cram the drive full, that will shift the write blocks around sufficiently that the drive will last years.

Technically, of course, any repeated writes to flash memory do reduce the lifespan below the "forever" if it were not used. But MLC flash generally supports about 10000 writes to each block and a 16GB drive has a lot of blocks.

                                                                   Joe

Is using a 16GB 3.0 flash drive a viable alternative for running Boinic projects or will it just make the lifespan of the flash drive shorter?

Well it will be shorter than if you were not running BOINC from it. However the life of flash is actually fairly high. I have been using a 16GB SD card on not notebook for BOINC since I got it in 2011.
I had an old 1GB USB flash drive I wasn't going to use anymore. So I plugged it into a system and then started a continuous HDD speed test app. Under a constant 24/7 thrash it lasted for a few days. I want to say 3.5, but I don't recall exactly at the moment.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[

I had to replace all the SD cards used on my Raspberry Pi's. They are supposedly rated for 100k writes. I got about a year out of them.

In the BOINC settings you can adjust the "write to disk" frequency. I currently have them to 600 seconds.

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BOINC blog

...I don't want to burn out the build in SSD drive with all the writing/rewriting that Seti does.

Not going to happen.
The amount that Seti does is next to nothing compared to what the OS does on a daily basis.
And as the Tech Report has shown with their SSD Endurance experiment even consumer SSDs are capable of handling daily writes far in excess of what would happen on a general usage desktop machine.
Coupled with having a minimum of 25% free space the effect of Seti's writes on the life of a SSD is effectively zero.


Keep in mind thumb drives & CF flash cards don't have nearly as robust memory cells as SSDs. Also I'm not sure just how good their wear levelling is- they're not designed for continuous use. As long as you have better than 50% free space normal desktop usage shouldn't greatly reduce the life of the device.

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Grant
Darwin NT

Maybe, but here's my logic. I can spend 100 USD for an external SSD or I can use the internal SSD on my MacBook Pro. If the external goes out, I'm out 100 USD. If the internal goes out..Well, I don't know if you have ever had to try and get a Mac fix. It gets $$ real quick. So.....

Maybe, but here's my logic. I can spend 100 USD for an external SSD or I can use the internal SSD on my MacBook Pro. If the external goes out, I'm out 100 USD. If the internal goes out..Well, I don't know if you have ever had to try and get a Mac fix. It gets $$ real quick. So.....

You could always do it yourself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJmJ2inU-qQ

I tried to find out the write life span of current SD and USB flash drives, but it looks like the manufactures have stopped listing that kind of information. Instead they just seems to give a warranty for X number of years. With the default BOINC setting to write ever minute that would be 525600 writes a year. If the device had a cell lifespan of 100k writes & with even the most basic wear leveling. Writing sequentially to every cell before starting at the beginning it would takes ages for a USB flash drive to get worn out from BOINC.

As I recall each app instances uses its own cycle to write data to the disk. With 4 CPU apps and a GPU app there would be 5 writes per minute I believe.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[

Is using a 16GB 3.0 flash drive a viable alternative for running Boinic projects or will it just make the lifespan of the flash drive shorter?

It's going to wear the drive out eventually, but it will probably take years, and they are pretty cheap anyway.

So I would say it's viable.

On my latest HP Pavillion 500-152ea I have a 2 TB hard disk. On a similar HP Pavillion 500-240el there is also a 2 TB disk, but a datasheet says it has a 16 GB SSD partition, that means it is a hybrid disk. The make of both disks is not specified but I suspect it is Seagate, whose datasheet says it has a 8 GB SSD section.
Since the datasheet of my PC says nothing other than the disk spins at 7200 RPM, like the other, I suspect that also mine is a hybrid disk. It runs well, anyway.
Tullio

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