And what if there is not much space available, am i useless?

Kostas Philippas
Kostas Philippas
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Topic 189112

dear reader,
you, also, already know as me that the recommended disk space for BOINC usage, when you select the features for your own account, is 100 Gbyte(!?!). Ofcourse, i erased that... my HDD is only 20 GB... it's small, but in the other hand 100 GB is too too big, at least for the most of the users( some may have this kind of space, and larger..)...
So the question is, are we, the ones who have small space, useless to this project, or we take part in another.... a liiiiiittle bit less valuable way?
The fact that a serius number of "narrow" HDDs sum up to lots of GBs, keeps my consciense clear... thanks

josep
josep
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And what if there is not much space available, am i useless?

You don't need at all 100 GB of disk space to contribute to E@H.

I run E@H in a partition with only 1 Gb free and it is enough. E@H data files usually need about 20 Mb of disk space. It depends on the number of WU's you download every time, but it will be near this value.

Perhaps you have read in your account, in general preferences, that the default value is "use no more than 100 GB of disk space". But is "no more than", the maximum value, not the minimum. And there are other options that define by default not to use more than 50% of available disk space.

So, don't worry, your 20 Gb disk is totally suitable, Einstein will not use more than 20 or 30 Mb.

Digger
Digger
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So the question is, are we,

So the question is, are we, the ones who have small space, useless to this project, or we take part in another.... a liiiiiittle bit less valuable way? The fact that a serius number of "narrow" HDDs sum up to lots of GBs, keeps my consciense clear... thanks

I've never even touched those disk usage and memory preferences. Just leave them all at the default value for now and everything will work fine. They're just maximum values, like Josep said. On my machine, Einstein rarely uses much over 22 or 23 MB. Your hard drive is more than adequate, so go ahead and attach to the project and start crunching. :)

Dig

Bruno G. Olsen & ESEA @ greenholt
Bruno G. Olsen ...
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are you guys sure leaving the

are you guys sure leaving the default values is a good thing if they exeed the available amounts on the host? (there's mention about the effects here)

but yes, they are maximums, not minimums, so lowering them won't affect the possibility to participate (unless of course the new values are way too low ;))

Digger
Digger
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are you guys sure leaving the

Message 11347 in response to message 11346

are you guys sure leaving the default values is a good thing if they exeed the available amounts on the host? (there's mention about the effects here)

Hiya Bruno :)

Oh, i dunno... the default value is to leave .1GB free. In the thread you mentioned, Tomdeal stated that the reason he ran into problems was because he had changed the default value to too high a number. That's one more reason to just leave the defaults alone i think. With a default maximum disk usage of 100GB, and leaving a minimum of .1GB free space on the drive, those default values should work fine for just about anybody, and certainly Kostas's 20GB drive, don't you think?

My normal policy anyway with regard to software is always to just use the default values, unless you have trouble. Then start playing with them as needed. :)

Dig

John McLeod VII
John McLeod VII
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I am running E@H on one

I am running E@H on one computer that has a 1GB HD (total space not free space).

Bruno G. Olsen & ESEA @ greenholt
Bruno G. Olsen ...
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are you guys sure leaving the

Message 11349 in response to message 11347

are you guys sure leaving the default values is a good thing if they exeed the available amounts on the host? (there's mention about the effects here)

Hiya Bruno :)

Oh, i dunno... the default value is to leave .1GB free. In the thread you mentioned, Tomdeal stated that the reason he ran into problems was because he had changed the default value to too high a number. That's one more reason to just leave the defaults alone i think. With a default maximum disk usage of 100GB, and leaving a minimum of .1GB free space on the drive, those default values should work fine for just about anybody, and certainly Kostas's 20GB drive, don't you think?

My normal policy anyway with regard to software is always to just use the default values, unless you have trouble. Then start playing with them as needed. :)

Dig

Well, the thing is, if the max is beyond the available then the project won't dl any wu's, or did I confuse earlier posts on several forums about this to be about the max value in stead of the min free value? :)

josep
josep
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There are three separate

Message 11350 in response to message 11349

There are three separate values in general preferences to control available disk space:

1 - "Use no more than..." set to 100 GB by default. The maximum absolute value that BOINC will use. The default is OK, no matter if it is higher than the real disk capacity.

2 - "leave at least..." set to 0.1 GB by default. This controls the minimum space that BOINC has to leave free for other applications and OS. The default is OK, unless you have very limited space, and BOINC is using too much, blocking your system because other applications need more than 100 MB free.

You can increase this value, but if you set a excessively high value, (more than the available space) then, there will be no enough space for BOINC to run. This was the problem in the thread you have referenced. But this can be useful when you want BOINC to complete processing WU's without downloading more work (if you plan to stop your machine several days, etc)

3 - "Use no more than.." set to "50% of total disk space" by default. The default is OK, unless you have very limited space and want to restrict it, like the previous parameter.

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