I notice that my hard drive light flashes periodically whenever SetiAtHome is running. Not a problem, but now that I'm running an SSD as my primary, I'm wondering if this will exhaust the write lifetime of the SSD. Can't you implement a ramdrive and just flush it up to your network when a work unit is finished?

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I notice that my hard drive light flashes periodically whenever SetiAtHome is running. Not a problem, but now that I'm running an SSD as my primary, I'm wondering if this will exhaust the write lifetime of the SSD. Can't you implement a ramdrive and just flush it up to your network when a work unit is finished?

If you Google similar questions about SSD lifetime ratings under a lot of writes, you will find that they are not a concern for the amount of writing BOINC does. The lifetime ratings are in the range 60-150 Terabytes.
https://www.ontrack.com/blog/2018/02/07/how-long-do-ssds-really-last/

If you are really concerned you can change the default BOINC checkpoint interval from 60 seconds to something like 180 seconds. Now 1/3 less drive writes achieved.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

You may also want to set your antivirus to ignore your BOINC folders.

Cheers.

Yup, the amount of disk usage that SETI causes might drop your expected SSD life from 30 years to 29....

In other words, you will probably trash the PC with 2/3 the SSD life left either way.

Boinc / SETI writes small amounts of data to the disk to keep track of tasks, so if power is lost unexpectedly, only the last ~60 secs is lost. Power up again and it resumes from the last checkpoint. But the amount of data is quite small, and the drive spreads the wear across all the cells on the disk, So it's not as if one cell is going to get hammered and fail. Every cell might get used once or twice out of it's thousands of cycles.