Dumb question..

I have an SSD as my C: Drive, and a Titan Z Black running Bionic.

Is there a way of knowing what drive Bionic uses??, and if it is using my C: drive. Can I tell it to move it to a HDD and not use my SSD..

Been having some free time so I thought I would let Bionic use the Titan Z to crunch..

Thanks Michael

:)

Dumb question..

I have an SSD as my C: Drive, and a Titan Z Black running Bionic.

Is there a way of knowing what drive Bionic uses??,

Post your Boinc startup from the Event log, the first 30 line will do.

and if it is using my C: drive. Can I tell it to move it to a HDD and not use my SSD.

Uninstall Boinc, move the Whole Boinc Data directory to it's new location, then Install Boinc again, on the Boinc configuaration page, hit the Advanced Button, and change the Data directory to the new location.

Claggy

Is there any reason to believe that using the SSD as the data directory is bad for the SSD, or will shorten its life? My PC has no HDD currently, but I could run with a virtual drive or get a cheap HDD if need be...

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Fear is a path to the Dark Side: Fear leads to Anger; Anger leads to Hate; Hate leads to Suffering.
~ Master Yoda, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

BOINC is pretty low bandwith, compared to what a modern SSD is capable of.
I wouldn't worry about it.

BOINC updates various status files every 60 seconds. You could increase that interval in your settings if you feel like it.

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That is highly debatable.

If you have a HDD on your system already then I would recommend using that, since there is a constant write/rewrite used by Seti.

Others will say that you will never exceed the rewrite limits of the SSD. Maybe, how knows how long it will last.

So the choice is yours but if your system already has both, I'd say used the HDD for the source for seti and leave the SSD for your OS.

my 2 cents..

Zalster

Honestly, I wouldn't even worry about it.

The SSD Endurance Experiment

BOINC will never put that much load on an SSD. Ever. Period.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

FWIW, according to the task manager, BOINC on my Win7 host has written about 2.4 gigabytes of data in 3 days.

This would sum up to a mere 1.5TB in 5 years.

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Ok Guys,

If things NEVER fail...why do they sell replacement parts??....hmm

Ok Guys,

If things NEVER fail...why do they sell replacement parts??....hmm

Because one-in-a-million events happen nine times out of ten...

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Ok Guys,

If things NEVER fail...why do they sell replacement parts??....hmm

Things certainly do fail and wear out.

However, for recent SSDs, then I would expect an SSD to last far longer in active use than a HDD.


Happy fast crunchin',
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Dumb question..

I have an SSD as my C: Drive, and a Titan Z Black running Bionic.

Is there a way of knowing what drive Bionic uses??, and if it is using my C: drive. Can I tell it to move it to a HDD and not use my SSD...

Very good question.


If you were using a memory stick or an sdcard flash storage, then yes there is concern for "wearing out the drive".

However, recent SSDs have good "wear levelling" whereby they can easily survive very high levels of writing to them for their expected lifetime.

In short, I'm now biased to use an SSD in preference to a HDD to avoid wearing out the head seeking in the HDD. You also gain the near zero latency of the SSD to speed up things in general.


Although this is of no concern whatsoever, and has completely negligible effect, for the sake of placebo effect you could set boinc to update for example only every 10 minutes for plecebonic peace of mind ;-)


Happy fast crunchin',
Martin


( Regardless of SSD or HDD, always keep backups! )

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Ok Guys,

If things NEVER fail...why do they sell replacement parts??....hmm

Because one-in-a-million events happen nine times out of ten...

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My active machine has been working 2 Samsung 840 Pro SSDs for at least 3 years now, 1 for the OS (C:) and 1 for data (D:). The BOINC data directory resides on the data drive. They both are backed up on an HDD. The system drive, which is the older of the two has written approx. 10.28 TB and the data drive has written approx. 3.81 TB. They will both probably outlast me. Whenever I get the funds to recreate my long dead i7/930, I will have all three drives on SSD.

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I don't buy computers, I build them!!

I bought my Corsair Force GS 128gb SSD in October 2013. So far, according to Corsair's SSD Toolbox, 6.5 TB of writes, 1.5 TB of reads. Life curve status: 100%. I use it for the temp directory for everything. After seeing the endurance experiment that I posted already, I'm not at all worried about wearing an SSD out.

Also, I have nothing important on the SSD anyway.. just the windows install and all of the games and applications. If it dies, it will be inconvenient, but as the saying goes: "and nothing of value was lost." All of my important data is on the 4x500gb RAID5 that is comprised of 7-year-old WD RE2 drives.

However, on my single mechanical drives, I don't defrag them or shuffle data around if I don't have to.. the less head movement you make, the lower the odds of a failure, and that data isn't backed up yet.


Bottom line, like I said.. if you didn't get the super-cheapest SSD you could find.. you'll be hard-pressed to wear them out. If you do get some bad blocks on them, almost all of them have several gigs worth of reserve blocks that will be called into action and you probably won't ever notice that a block went bad in the first place.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

Is there any reason to believe that using the SSD as the data directory is bad for the SSD, or will shorten its life?

No.


Longer answer- a SSD has a limited number of writes before failure of the memory cells will occur. As mentioned, all SSD use what is called wear levelling to spread the writes out over the entire SSD so that no particular cell or group of cells receives more writes than other cells or groups of cells.
Endurance for consumer drives is much lower than that for enterprise systems. Having said that, generally you would need to write to the full drive capacity several times a day in order to drastically reduce the life of the drive.
In normal use, you're looking at decades before cells will start to fail- at which point the SSD controller will start to used reserved space to replace the faulty memory cells.

The Tech Report have been doing an endurance experiment of several consumer SSD- it has been running for over 1 2months & in that time several SSDs have died- after exceeding their stated life expectancy for writes by about 3 or 4 times ( I think it was). There are a couple of SSDs still going, after 2 Peta Bytes of writes.

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Grant
Darwin NT

What I see in my laptop with a 250 GB SSD is a lowering of I/O read speed well below its npminal capabilities. Instead on my main Linux host where a 120 GB SSD is used as second disk, with most of the work done on the 500 GB Seagate hard disk, the performance of the SSD, as measured by the hdparm tool, stay good.
Tullio

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Tech Report's endurance experiment finally ended. It had a surprising winner.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

Ok Guys,

If things NEVER fail...why do they sell replacement parts??....hmm

Because one-in-a-million events happen nine times out of ten...

It's a combination of the Law of Averages plus Murphy's Law ;-)

P.

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Tech Report's endurance experiment finally ended. It had a surprising winner.

And the winner is... us. The consumer.

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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[

Tech Report's endurance experiment finally ended. It had a surprising winner.

And the winner is... us. The consumer.

I was surprised at the longevity of them, given the past warnings I have read occasionally about SSDs.
The lifespan shown would outlast most computers in daily use for many many years.

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster