I recently installed BOINC on an older computer that I had laying around. It installed without issue, but when it starts to download work for SETI@Home, it request over 86,000 seconds of work. (my newer, more powerful rigs only get 30-150 seconds at a pop) As a result it says that it needs something like 17 GB of hard drive space for that and that is more than I have available on that drive.

Am I doing something wrong here?

It's an HP Celeron running Win XP home.

I'll post more info when I get home and can give you specs on the computer.

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I recently installed BOINC on an older computer that I had laying around. It installed without issue, but when it starts to download work for SETI@Home, it request over 86,000 seconds of work. (my newer, more powerful rigs only get 30-150 seconds at a pop) As a result it says that it needs something like 17 GB of hard drive space for that and that is more than I have available on that drive.

Am I doing something wrong here?

It's an HP Celeron running Win XP home.

I'll post more info when I get home and can give you specs on the computer.

86400 seconds of work is one day. How many work units are actually going to be sent depends on the estimate of the speed of the computer (based on the benchmarks that run when you install BOINC) and the estimate of the number of floating point operations that the task will take (the estimate can, of course, be wrong).

Now as to the amount of Hard Disk space required, there are three settings available for how much HD is available to BOINC. Use at Most X MB, Leave At Least X Mb, and Use at most X%. If ANY of these fails, then BOINC will not get more work. It is entirely possible to configure these settings so that there is no problem on a large HD that comes with a new computer, but there is so much reserved that an older computer with a smaller HD won't have any HD available, even before the installation of the OS.

BTW, I have had BOINC running S@H on a computer with 1GB of HD space. The only reason that my current slowest computer does not have S@H is the lack of RAM.

Now, could you post your Disk Usage settings?

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BOINC WIKI

Added to what John said, if you are using the web-based preferences and they are set up for the fast computer, then do know that each new computer you add to your profile will by default use those same preferences.

You can change that by either setting up another venue for this host, with different (more down to earth for this computer) preferences, or use the overriding preferences through BOINC Manager.

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The error I'm getting is this:

SETI@home|Sending scheduler request: Requested by user. Requesting 86401 seconds of work, reporting 0 completed tasks
SETI@home|Scheduler request succeeded: got 0 new tasks
SETI@home|Message from server: No work sent
SETI@home|Message from server: There was work but you don't have enough disk space allocated.
SETI@home|Message from server: An additional 7706 MB is needed.

Disk setting:

Use at most: .5GB
Leave at least: 5Gb
Use at most: 25%

Disk is 31.7 GB with 11.0 Free.

Copmuter is HP Pavillion a300n, Intel Celeron 2.6GHz, with 512 Ram.

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Use at most: .5GB
Leave at least: 5Gb
Use at most: 25%

You're now telling BOINC to use at most 500MB of disk space, leave at least 5,000MB of space free and not use more than 7,925MB of total disk space.

I don't know, but I would change "at least" and "at most" around. {hint} :-)

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Use at most: .5GB
Leave at least: 5Gb
Use at most: 25%

You're now telling BOINC to use at most 500MB of disk space, leave at least 5,000MB of space free and not use more than 7,925MB of total disk space.

I don't know, but I would change "at least" and "at most" around. {hint} :-)

If it is just S@H, 0.5GB is likely to be sufficient as S@H uses about 10MB + 1MB / task not started + 60MB / running task (one per CPU likely) + 200KB / task completed and not yet reported (I know that this is an over estimate of space required). Other projects have very different requirements (CPDN uses 1GB / task).

Leaving 5GB free may be too much for a smaller HD. More than one of my computers does not have a HD that large. You should really set this down to something much more in tune with the HD you have.

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BOINC WIKI

I set the "Leave at most" to 2Gb and it apears to be working. It downloaded fine and is crunching away.

Thanks for the help.

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