I have some old parts (pentium d 930, 4GB ddr2, ect) and was currious if it's possible to partition off 2GB, and install / run seti from a ram disk?

Rather than discard the old bits, I thought it would be nice to have some old machine cruching 24/7 in the garage (or elsewhere out of site). My plan is to boot from a usb stick and essentially just have a motherboard, cpu, ram, and power supply in a box

I have some old parts (pentium d 930, 4GB ddr2, ect) and was currious if it's possible to partition off 2GB, and install / run seti from a ram disk?

Rather than discard the old bits, I thought it would be nice to have some old machine cruching 24/7 in the garage (or elsewhere out of site). My plan is to boot from a usb stick and essentially just have a motherboard, cpu, ram, and power supply in a box

I believe you will find what you need here...
BoincPE

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Official Abuser of Boinc Buttons...
And no good credit hound!

I have some old parts (pentium d 930, 4GB ddr2, ect) and was currious if it's possible to partition off 2GB, and install / run seti from a ram disk?

Rather than discard the old bits, I thought it would be nice to have some old machine cruching 24/7 in the garage (or elsewhere out of site). My plan is to boot from a usb stick and essentially just have a motherboard, cpu, ram, and power supply in a box

I believe you will find what you need here...
BoincPE

Or if you prefer Linux, Dotsch UX will do the trick too.

Thanks! I'll give it a shot. I briefly searched the forum and google but didn't see anything so wasn't sure if there was something keeping it from being an option.

The only gotcha with a USB memory stick is the limited number of write cycles. BOINC and BOINC science projects write a lot of data.

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BOINC WIKI

The only gotcha with a USB memory stick is the limited number of write cycles. BOINC and BOINC science projects write a lot of data.

It's true, but not exactly a simple situation. SLC (Single Level Cell) NAND flash has an endurance of about 100000 writes to each cell, MLC (Multiple Level Cell) NAND flash only about 10000. SLC is faster, MLC stores more data. Then there's the wear levelling in the controller chips which shifts write blocks around to keep the number of writes to each area more or less balanced, and often some extra blocks of cells which can be brought in as replacements.

There's an interesting test at http://www.bress.net/blog/archives/114-How-Long-Does-a-Flash-Drive-Last.html and useful calculations on how to estimate a device life from the flash characteristics in http://www.cactus-tech.com/download/CTAN006-EnduranceModel-20080603.pdf.

                                                               Joe

I think what you want would be BOINC PE. It has been a while since I looked at it, but iirc. You can adjust the size of the ram drive that is created & set the time to save the ram drive data to a real storage device. Which seems to be an ideal answer for booting BOINC from a flash drive & running it on a disk less system.

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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've run BoincPE on diskless systems that boot from a 512mB USB flash chip... The chip can be marked as read only and copys the disk image to RAM at boot/system startup. Persistance can be configured to a networked server at scheduled intervals. Remote access is pretty easy to setup using TightVNC.

It's been a couple years since I set up the diskless systems and am no longer running them for various reasons. IIRC, the most difficult part was getting the network interface controller (NIC) drivers installed for the different motherboards.

It isn't easy to use the various tools required to generate the final disk image on the flash drive, but if you've got enough spare time to research and do the necessary trials, it can be a gratifying experience.

Good luck,

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