Folding with an SSD.

batmeat · October 31st, 2009, 06:48 PM

I finally got my SSD Raid 0 rig going. The question is...when running F@H has anyone checked to see how often data is written to the hard drive? I ask 'cause lots of reads/writes to an SSD are a big no no. It wears the drive out. Other then that, I love SSD. I'm still tweaking it, but my reads are averaging 325Mb's a sec. The writes are at 50Mb's a sec, way low for SSD, but I'm working with Corsair on the issue.

KarmaKiller · October 31st, 2009, 06:59 PM

I know on every PC I have, the HDD activity light is constantly going when folding. I do think it writes often to the HDD. You might look into alternative drive for folding.

engracio · October 31st, 2009, 07:01 PM

AFAIK, it depends on what you selected as far as between save time. i.e 3-10 min between save for console client.

batmeat · October 31st, 2009, 07:55 PM

I've got to do that for my temp files for my web browser too. I shut folding down until I get a hard drive installed. What's best for windows 7 Deino or mpi?

KarmaKiller · October 31st, 2009, 07:57 PM

Folding@Home FAQ's

Sky King · November 11th, 2009, 10:33 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by batmeat

I finally got my SSD Raid 0 rig going. The question is...when running F@H has anyone checked to see how often data is written to the hard drive? I ask 'cause lots of reads/writes to an SSD are a big no no. It wears the drive out. Other then that, I love SSD. I'm still tweaking it, but my reads are averaging 325Mb's a sec. The writes are at 50Mb's a sec, way low for SSD, but I'm working with Corsair on the issue.

A couple of thoughts...

1. Most SSDs have a built-in wear-leveling algorithm that spreads the write-load across the entire drive. Most of the higher end SSD makers say that even under heavy server load, or with a paging file on board, the wear-leveling should make a drive last at least 5 years, similar to the planned lifespan of a magnetic spinning drive. The higher the capacity of the drive, the smaller % of the drive is getting heavy writes, meaning the wear-leveling mechanism can actually make a drive last longer too. In other words, a 6GB paging file has a bigger impact on the lifespan a 32GB drive than it does on a 64GB drive.

2. 50MB/sec is not necessarily slow for an SSD. Most "mainstream" SSDs will read at 70-200MB/sec and will write at 40-70MB/sec. Then there are the higher end, or what intel calls "extreme" drives that will do 150-170MB/sec writes. So it depends on what you have. OCZ, Intel, and Runcore all have extreme drives available, but they are quite expensive compared to mainstream SSDs--typically 2 to 3 times the price.

3. I am not sure, I haven't run a profiling tool (like sysinternal's) against folding to see what kind of disk access is involved, but in my case, it seems to be very little. Aside from writing checkpoints to the disk my folders don't seem to keep the disks busy at all. Are you sure it is not paging activity, or other windows bloat that is doing it?

Remember too that there may be other facets to SSDs you need to read up on, like how TRIM works and when/why you might need it. It is too simplistic to simply say "don't defrag an SSD"... there are other ways in which your file-based OS and the block-based controller of the SSD may interfere with each other and I recommend SSDs only to those who are technical enough to read up a little on how to maximize the lifespan and performance of their SSD.

batmeat · November 11th, 2009, 11:10 AM

Thanks, lots of good info there. I got my SSD's setup though now so my reads and writes are around 400mb's a second. I do a lot of video work so I bought 60gb drive to offload mundane work to to decrease the amounts to writes to the ssd's. I have the Corsair P128's and currently TRIM isn't supported by the samsung controller, albeit a new firmware is supposedly on the horizon to support it.