| Index | Recent Threads | Unanswered Threads | Who's Active | Guidelines | Search |
 |
World Community Grid Forums
Category: Support
Forum: BOINC Agent Support
Thread: Running hard drive 365/7/24 |
| No member browsing this thread |
|
Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 6
|
|
| Author |
|
|
Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Does anyone have information on whether running the BOINC client on a Windows client would shorten the life of the hard drive? If so, how can you minimize the effect?
|
||
|
|
Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
BOINC doesn't read/write to disk very often - only during checkpoints, or downloading/uploading WUs.
Windows will perform a lot more read/writes on the disk than BOINC ever would. |
||
|
|
twilyth
Master Cruncher US Joined: Mar 30, 2007 Post Count: 2130 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
|
The most likely reason for boinc to use your hard drive is indirectly by it's use of virtual memory. So, the best way to reduce accessing the page file is to install more memory. Prices have come down considerably in recent months and you can get 2gig of ddr2-800 (pc6400) memory for under $100.
----------------------------------------Another major cause of HDD stress is fragmentation. The more fragmented your drive, the more it has to work to retrieve the same amount of information. Since MTBF for HDD's is at least 100,000 hours (over 10 years) and Western digital is claiming 300,000 hours for its new drives, disk failure shouldn't be a major concern. However that's never an excuse not to backup important files. Even HDD from good manufacturers can bite the dust prematurely. That happened to me recently and it well and truly svcked. On the other hand, I have some drives under 10 gig that have been running continuously for - god - I don't even know - several years at least. Your drive is probably SMART enabled (Self Monitoring Analysis & Reporting Technology) so you can try some software that accesses this information and alerts you if there are any changes you need to handle. One free proggie (free for personal use) is Passmark's Diskcheckup (Diskcheckup info and download). You can even set it up to email you under certain conditions such as high drive temperature. Also, it's a small download - less than half a meg.   |
||
|
|
Vester
Senior Cruncher USA Joined: Nov 18, 2004 Post Count: 325 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
|
I have been running distributed computing projects 24/7 on my Dell Dimension 8200 since January 2002. It is still running the original Western Digital 7200 RPM 100 GB hard drive. I replaced the CPU fan to reduce noise, upgraded to an Intel Northwood P4 2.8 GHz (vs 2.0 GHz Willamette), upgraded to a 410 watt PC Power and Cooling, Inc. quiet power supply, and replaced the GeForce3 video card with an nVidia 6800 XT 512 MB video card. It is still running only 512 MB of RAMBUS PC800. I set up my Windows XP and Vista computers with page files of 2560 MB initial and 2560 MB final size. I recommend reading the appropriate Tweakguides Tweaking Companion.
----------------------------------------I suggest that you run a full scan at PC Pitstop to quickly identify potential problems. If you have further questions, ask here. You will find that running a distributed computing project will help you to learn more about your computer. Happy crunching!  |
||
|
|
JmBoullier
Former Community Advisor Normandy - France Joined: Jan 26, 2007 Post Count: 3715 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
|
helpdesk_PLCMC,
----------------------------------------To summarize about Boinc and disk usage 1. If Boinc runs alone in a machine with enough physical memory (i.e. no memory swapping to disk) disk usage is extremely low and not frequent. 2. If Boinc running alone generates much swapping it could be advantageous to consider either adding memory (if it is an option) or not running Boinc otherwise, not for the health of the disk drive (they can endure it) but because processing will be extremely slow and inefficient anyway. 3. If Boinc generates much swapping only when the user is performing normal activity and if adding physical memory is not an option you might consider updating two parameters of the "Processor usage" section of the "Device Profile", namely a) "Do work while computer is in use?": select "No" b) "Do work only after computer is idle for": set an appropriate delay. Again, this is not for the health of the disk drive, but more for the user's ease of use of the machine. Otherwise s/he might find Boinc is making his/her life less nice than it was supposed to. Cheers. Jean. |
||
|
|
Sekerob
Ace Cruncher Joined: Jul 24, 2005 Post Count: 20043 Status: Offline |
Here a report that came out a 6 months ago headed by many IT websites with "Massive Google hard drive survey turns up very interesting things ...". The PDF of the original report is here: Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population
----------------------------------------The best trick in the book is putting the OSses Swapfile on a separate physical drive and set at a substantial minimum size.... the more cores the more VM is needed. If that swapfile is on a general purpose user disk, use periodically or every boot a program called PageDefrag (from fka SysInternals). VM usage by the FA@H can be 450mb per core (1.8gb on a quad) and Help Defeat Cancer used over 1gb at times, so this frequently written to and read system file is best kept in top notch shape. For reading disk SMART state and alerts my tip is Speedfan. Aside an extensive health report of the HD, it reads out also temperatures of any sensor there is in a system and can even initiate an SMTP email message crunchers not in immediate view when things get too hot. Of course as the name implies it regulates fan speed for optimal temp stability and best noise reduction. Though the BOINC default for disk writes is 60 seconds in the "Write To Disk At Most Every" profile setting, you can extend that to 999 seconds (16.65 minutes). I've found it to cut dramatically on disk i/o, downside being that progress checkpoints of the jobs are not saved whenever they occur. On a machine that runs for longer periods of the day or continuously it's a none issue. One looses sometimes 30 minutes of progress on a restart. Now do i worry about my disk.... not really. it's 6 years old in the desktop, been trashed continuous by music playing and 2.5 years of crunching while working and browsing away. cheers (all utilities mentioned here are included in a Start Here FAQ: http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewthread?thread=2490
WCG
Please help to make the Forums an enjoyable experience for All! |
||
|
|
|