Bearcat, did you install Ubuntu directly, or through Wubi? I know the disk I/O is slower and the efficiency less with Wubi installs.

Yes it does, from Ubuntu 10.10 / kernel 2.6.33.
You need to add 'discard' to the file system options in /etc/fstab for TRIM to work, see
http://askubuntu.com/questions/18903/how-to-enable-trim

Not that I know of, but you can do it manually from the command line.

0) Check the file /etc/default/boinc-client, it contains a variable BOINC_DIR with the folder BOINC is using.
For a default install on Ubuntu 11.10, this is /var/lib/boinc-client

1) Shut down boinc (important, or you may get corrupted files):

sudo service boinc-client stop

2) Check the permissions for the existing BOINC folder.

$ ls -ld /var/lib/boinc-client
drwxr-xr-x 5 boinc boinc 4096 2011-12-07 18:28 /var/lib/boinc-client

3) Create a directory on the new disk with the same permissions, and copy the contents:

  # make new dir; assuming that the new disk is mounted on srv:
$ sudo mkdir /srv/boinc
  # set boinc as owner
$ sudo chown boinc.boinc /srv/boinc
  # copy. need the -a flag for the copy to have the same permissions as the original
$ sudo cp -ar /var/lib/boinc-client/* /srv/boinc

4) Edit /etc/default/boinc-client to point to the new location:

# BOINC_DIR="/var/lib/boinc-client"
BOINC_DIR="/srv/boinc"

4) Restart Boinc:

sudo service boinc-client start

Check that Boinc keeps folding where it left off. If something went wrong, you can change BOINC_DIR back to the original and restart the boinc-client service.

I have done this on several machines, it works fine.
But there is always some risk when fiddling around at the lower levels, so I suggest switching at a point where the worst-case loss of your work in progress would be tolerable.

Very nice instructions!!! Also thank for Trim link, very cool!

@Bearcat Yes, it should work, but you might need to do some manual tweaking of ownership and symlinks afterwards. (The system may think that the 'old boinc' is a different user than the 'new boinc', and the symlinks might break.)
I'd still suggest doing it at a point where you wouldn't mind too much if you lose all work in progress.

@brinktastee Thanks!

Happy crunching :)

Just another thought. Use clonezilla and clone to another disk. I know I have to use equal or greater size. I have a 1TB hitachi (same as in my win7 machine) I could use to replace the maxtor. Any issues doing this I should be aware of? Being a clone, I wouldn't think any problems. Would boinc have issues?