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Category: Support
Forum: BOINC Agent Support
Thread: SSD or harddrive for BOINC |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 9
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Hello.
I consider buying a SSD for my laptop, which runs BOINC non-stop. Everybody knows the advantages SSD gives, like super fast booting and loading time. But does it make BOINC run any faster? Also, SSDs wear out much faster than harddrives if you write to them often. With enough RAM, the computer will not use the harddrive/SSD for swapping. Or will it? So, is SSD a good or bad thing for BOINC? Operating system is Ubuntu. |
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KerSamson
Master Cruncher Switzerland Joined: Jan 29, 2007 Post Count: 1671 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Hei Mannen
----------------------------------------at this time, the only project where I experienced a "significant" difference with/without SSD is CEP2 (using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS).
If you consider an improvement of 3%, in the very best case (24/7/365 WCG only), you will increase your contribution to WCG with 262 hours yearly (per core). In all cases, using a SSD is not bad. However you have to assess for your-self if the additional costs for a SSD are justified or not. Godt nytt år ! Yves |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Thank you for replying.
A tiny increase in performance is not worth the money. But I also wonder whether BOINC will "wear out" an SSD? My next computer will probably have a SSD. |
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mikey
Veteran Cruncher Joined: May 10, 2009 Post Count: 821 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Hello. I consider buying a SSD for my laptop, which runs BOINC non-stop. Everybody knows the advantages SSD gives, like super fast booting and loading time. But does it make BOINC run any faster? Also, SSDs wear out much faster than harddrives if you write to them often. With enough RAM, the computer will not use the harddrive/SSD for swapping. Or will it? So, is SSD a good or bad thing for BOINC? Operating system is Ubuntu. Community Adviser SekeRob did some tests and an SSD drive is faster overall and because of the checkpoints that the Boinc software makes while crunching can make all projects faster. Some of that checkpoint speed can be recovered by increasing the time between checkpoints but not all of it. The bigger the checkpoint the more advantage the SSD drive has. ALOT of new systems are coming with SSD C:\ drives so they boot much faster. I personally swapped one into my netbook as it goes with me whenever I travel and is less prone to problems and the machine boots faster too, I do not crunch with it though.   |
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Hypernova
Master Cruncher Audaces Fortuna Juvat ! Vaud - Switzerland Joined: Dec 16, 2008 Post Count: 1908 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Thank you for replying. A tiny increase in performance is not worth the money. But I also wonder whether BOINC will "wear out" an SSD? My next computer will probably have a SSD. For the moment I have one SSD Crucial M3 250GB running 24/7 on one machine that does only crunching for WCG. I have Win7 Ultimate SP1 on it and the TRIM feature is active. After a full year nothing to say, no visible loss of performance.   |
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sk..
Master Cruncher http://s17.rimg.info/ccb5d62bd3e856cc0d1df9b0ee2f7f6a.gif Joined: Mar 22, 2007 Post Count: 2324 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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I purchased a 64GB SSD to use specifically for crunching. I'm going to install an operating system on a normal SATA2 drive and install the Boinc folder onto the SSD. The OC'd i7-2600K system will mostly crunch CEP2, climate models and GPU tasks.
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
SSD for hard disk / super-fast RAM for main memory. These are 2 ways to spend money that have only minimal impact on speed. My advice is to do it only if you will get thrills and chills just knowing that you have it. If you get a smartphone / ereader / tablet instead, you can show it off and brag about its neat features. If you get an Android system instead of an Apple, you can spend money and brag about how frugal you are.
 Hope I don't sound like the Grinch Who Stole Christmas!  Happy New Year! Lawrence |
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Dark Angel
Veteran Cruncher Australia Joined: Nov 11, 2005 Post Count: 721 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Yeah, if you've already got an 80 core system with a substantial IO bottleneck then a SSD for a crunching rig might make some degree of sense, but other than that ... not exactly the best bang for buck on a regular system.
----------------------------------------God e-peen value, but not so much in the real world.  Currently being moderated under false pretences |
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KerSamson
Master Cruncher Switzerland Joined: Jan 29, 2007 Post Count: 1671 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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For my-self, 12 months ago I spent SSD for two Phenom II x6 based hosts. The main and initial reason was not boinc but using these both systems for hosting virtual machines. Since I noticed some performance issue with VM because of HDD bottleneck and fragmentation, I decided to operate the VM from SSD instead.
----------------------------------------Just for info, in order to avoid mistake, the VMs do not have anything to do with boinc. The both systems run luckily since one year with Ubuntu 10.04 x64 and the reaction time is really amazing (Ubuntu boots already fast, but because of SSD it is significant faster). Even if SSD could help by performance improvement, after several tries, I decided to limit CEP2 at 2 WUs simultaneously on these both 6 core systems, since the performance loss increases rapidly with this project. Happy new year to everybody and happy crunching in 2012 !  Cheers, Yves |
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