The Scottish Boinc Team

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

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

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

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...

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

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.

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.

I deny everything. My brother sells really good stuff

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

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