LHC@home

My recent HD is quite old and i think HD motor would die after running non-stop for too long. On other hand i found an USB Storage device (USB2.0 256MB), which gave me an idea of install BOINC into the USB device, so the mainboard should save the progess into the device without access the HD. But do you think this is possible?

Thanks

<blockquote>My recent HD is quite old and i think HD motor would die after running non-stop for too long. On other hand i found an USB Storage device (USB2.0 256MB), which gave me an idea of install BOINC into the USB device, so the mainboard should save the progess into the device without access the HD. But do you think this is possible?

Thanks</blockquote>

I tested out Boinc on a usb drive when boinc came out of beta. I think it works fine.

Only trouble with flash drives is the small ones are the simple FAT format, which has no redundancy in the file table. So if you take the drive out while still running, you could screw up the file table. (there's a lot of file recovery tools out there to rebuild your file table anyways)
So, just remember to exit boinc completely and wait for all the read/write stuff to finish.

Some people will 'say' that you could wear out the flash drive by too many read/writes, but have only heard that from anecdotal stories on the net by people who used it a a linux swap disk, which would be an extreme case. There are hardware appliances which use flash style memory (ie, your router with upgradeable firmware, or wireless access point or firewall, or digital camera, mp3 players, voice recorders, mars rovers, etc.) Some of those devices do a lot of reads/writes.

Some boinc projects may have trouble being limited to 256 megs. (climateprediction) Boinc lists its usage as 45 megs on my pc, 2.3 megs for the app (boinc 4.19) 20 megs for Einstein, 6.5 megs for LHC, 16 megs for protein predictor. Seti has low disk requirements as well.

I think it should work.

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I'm not the LHC Alex. Just a number cruncher like everyone else here.

<blockquote>My recent HD is quite old and i think HD motor would die after running non-stop for too long. On other hand i found an USB Storage device (USB2.0 256MB), which gave me an idea of install BOINC into the USB device, so the mainboard should save the progess into the device without access the HD. But do you think this is possible?

Thanks</blockquote>

The Mean Time Between Failure of modern disks (disks less than about five years old) exceeds 300,000 hours, or about 34 years. Most failures occur early (i.e. the first few weeks of the disk's life) or late - which with MTBF of 300,000 hours is likely be ten years or more into the disk life. Your disk is likely to be somewhere in the middle, so I wouldn't worry about the disk life.

USB devices based on solid state technology do have a limited life. Depending on the technology in use and the age of the product this will be somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 write cycles.

You're better off using your disk it's bigger, faster , and less likely to fail.

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Gaspode the UnDressed
http://www.littlevale.co.uk

I run boinc over Network, and the access-time is really good.
Networkserver 4GByte Ram, Raid5, Switched-GigaBit. It serve the Boinc disk-access of 100 PC, only a litte bit slower than run it local, but very much easier to make updates and service. Only slowdown problem is if all access the same time, like the time where lhc has more 0-Time units. :)

Who sell me a for the 0-Time Units a 10Gbyte-Ram-Drive :-) :-)

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Ah thanks, now i do think is fine for my HD to run. My HD is about 2-3 years old (Western Digital 40GB). But yet i heard other said is even fine for running non-stop for a whole year. :)

Thanks alot. Really wish to see how will LHC project will work in final!