Experience with SSD over mechanical HDD and BOINC
12 Nov 2012 5:17:17 UTC
Topic 196620
(moderation:
Hey folks, just wanted to chime in and share my experiences with this little cache SSD I picked up, which is a Corsair Accelerator 30GB.
I'm not very happy with this drive. The first being that I didn't do my research to find out that they do not work with p67 chipsets (the board I'm using). So, I went to use it on a secondary box running an AM3+ socket. Began to install the software, no go. It said that my boot partition and data partition cannot be separate. But, they aren't separate on that box.
So I had two choices, either RMA or use it as a standard 30GB drive. The latter is pretty much worthless but went for it anyway. I then got the idea, "Hey, I'll install BOINC on that drive".
Boinc causes my hdd to normally thrash. I can hear constant reading/writing going on at night. I know it's Boinc because if I turn it off, the thrashing stops. It's not a RAM issue, I have 32GB in this machine.
But, putting Boinc on the SSD has eliminated the noisy accessing. That's a plus.
To my surprise however, I found that CPU workunits are completing 20+ minutes faster! I've an I7-3770 and it will run 8 threads and complete each in about 5:20. But I'm seeing times under the 5 hour mark since the move. GPU crunch time is not affected.
To reiterate, this is a cache drive but is not acting like one, it's just being used as a 30GB SSD. For me, there is increased production. In any case, figured I'd pass that along.
Experience with SSD over mechanical HDD and BOINC
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I am using a 120 GB SSD by OCZ on my laptop running 3 BOINC projects and it is both faster and cooler than the 320 GB hard disk at 5400 rpm.
Tullio
Hi! I would not have
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Hi!
I would not have expected to see a noticeable performance increase for CPU apps by installing a SSD. While your host has completed some GW tasks in well under 5 hrs before, indeed the last few results were all on the fast side.
So it's really just BOINC that was moved to the SSD? Not also the Swap file perhaps ;-) ? Sorry, had to ask. The only significant amount of file IO that the app does is on start up (reading all the input files), when checkpointing (I see no indications that the app is checkpointing excessively and that shoudl also affect the GPU apps), and just before finishining when it writes the final result files. BOINC itself is also doing file io (e.g. updating the client_state.xml file), but that should not slow down the app. Hmmm....I have to check whether the communication with the screensaver via file mapped shared memory might have an influence. Anyway,thanks for sharing your observation.
Cheers
HB
RE: Hey folks, just wanted
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I agree, SSD's sometimes are inadequad for using with BOINC. But my experience is: not BOINC itself is the source of the problems, it's the bios on the MB's.
I'm running two desktops with SSD's without any problem (including BOINC) and two NB's with SSD's (both without problems).
On one desktop the SSD is not recognized (MB older than 3 years) and one PC (a Zotac ZBox) works with SSD, but fails ~once a day when running BOINC and ~twice a month when not running BOINC.
My experience is: if a system runs error-free under usual conditions it also runs error-free with BOINC. My mainsys is equipped with SSD, running error-free since last dezember.
Even when manufacturers say, SATA is well documented interface and it makes no difference, which hardware is behind, the facts show a different scenario. The SSD from the Zotac works perfect with an other MB.
IF a MB works well with a SSD it's worth to use it. Speed, noise and energy are on the + sinde, costs are on the - side, but the - is shrinking.
RE: Hi! I would not have
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Hey Bikeman,
What I did was actually completely uninstall Boinc and then when I went to reinstall, set it up on the SSD. I didn't just move the app over, fresh install went with it.
As far as the screensaver, I'm not using that at all.