Boot and work disks

[davidbam]

Am now buying 60Gb SSDs for under £15 ... https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/16GB-32GB-64 ... 2749.l2649

Seem fine for most purposes (on Linux) but - heh - the sprint on LHC was very greedy on disk space

Apart from the speed, I really like SSD for caseless builds as they can sit almost anywhere, don't heat up (much) and don't care if they get dropped or shoogled. I even have a couple of 32Gb SSD and they are grand too

[Alez]

hmmmm, is this product advertising
Having used the company in question for both ram and hdd requirements, I can state never had a bad one yet.
They also do 500GB hdd for £13. Again other sizes are available.
Of course other companies are available

[davidbam]

No, testimonial rather than advertising - I've always had good products and service from this seller. I was buying SSDs from crucial.com but they start at 120Gb

[Dirk Broer]

I think that it is good practice to have an OS disk, a personal data disk and a BOINC disk. When you have multiple virtual machines you might want to increase the number of disks too.
In modern systems the OS disk is preferably a SSD (and in the most preferable state a NVMe M.2 SSD), the personal data disk might be any number of x TeraByte HDDs, the BOINC disk whatever you think is best for your projects. Take in mind the huge downloads of some projects though, and do not go smaller than 256GB...

[davidbam]

Hmmm - not just LHC being greedy then. Personally, I think that some projects are setting the bar too high for a volunteering project.

Time to re-think my stables. Think I'll go for just a few thoroughbreds and relegate the older kit to donkey rides for permanent CPU crunching on WCG

[Bryan]

If they are pure crunchers I just run 1 or 2 HDDs. Either I split 1 HDD in two and use 1/2 for Windows and 1/2 for Linux or put one on each. There is no personal data so that is irrelevant.

On the last 2 builds (2990WX) I used M2 SSDs.

[Alez]

I use 60 or 80 GB HDD for BOINC. Never filled one yet. Just bought a pair of 60GB SSD's to try BOINC on. I blame [mention]davidBAM[/mention] and his blatant product placement.

[davidbam]

I deny everything. My brother sells really good stuff

[davidbam]

After the LHC sprint, I have decided that an alternate boot to a large USB3 disk (ideally also SSD) will be a quick, simple and very flexible way of switching over the thoroughbred machines for sprinting. I was finding that it was just taking me too long to re-orient a dozen machines each time.

A VM would be even easier of course (except that I've now installed our WCG performance monitor on the largest of them - hmmm might need to move that to the Data Centre)

I will report back in due course

[davidbam]

Thanks Pete. Yes I was made aware of boinctasks. I deliberately didn't look at it while I was writing the Performance Monitor as, rightly or wrongly, I wanted to implement my own concept of how that would work.

I do realise boinctasks is a different beast so really should look at that now for its control functions. I've been using ssh and boincmgr to headless machines which isn't too bad