I am a very new user of Seti@home via BOINC, singed up last week actually. There was a point in the past when I was quite up on the latest and greatest in the computing universe but that was about 15 years ago. Since then other parts of life have dominated my thoughts and the technology has zipped past me in warp speed.

Reading the forums and tech info on here seems like I'm trying to learn a new language. Is there any way to get information in dumbed down English so I don't have to go an try to catch up on all that has changed since 2000? A few questions I have right now are;

What is the best consumer system to use for Seti@home?

How can I redirect the data to an unused external USB2.0 hard drive, it has 1TB of free space that I'd like to dedicate. I would like to have it filled with data to be processed. I'd like to have it filled in one session and then cleared and refilled after all of the data has been processed. Uploading results can remain as is unless there is a better way to package it up and send it after the entire drive has been processed.

I may have access to a virtually cost free server that I'd like to set up at home. The number of processors and drives it can support is expandable and I plan to build onto it over time. Is there any resource that could assist me in setting it up and optimizing it for Seti@home? This will be it's only function.

Thanks from an ex-geek.
Gman

---

GMAN

Is it possible to tell BOINC to use the drive, certainly. When installing BOINC, third screen in the installer click Advanced, then change the path to the data directory.

However:
Seti has a maximum of 100 tasks for CPU and 100 for GPU, so you can never fill a 1TB drive with data from this project alone.

Even if it were possible, seeing how Seti Multibeam tasks are ~366KB big per task, you'd be asking for about 2,9407,617,605 tasks to fill that 1TB drive.

Seeing how at any given time that everything at the back-end of Seti works normally, there are ~300,000 tasks available, you can do the math how long it's going to take to download all that work.

And what if your computer's going to return erroneous results and you're not seeing that? That means loads of resends to other computers.

So, luckily not possible. Not at Seti at least.

---