Hard drive usage while folding

[Gray_area]

In the "I wanna save electricity" thread, someone mentioned running f@h without a hard drive. My hd light is blinking constantly while its running on my computer(4 instances console version). It's made me consider moving the directories to a thumb drive, and have it run off of that.
Has anyone done that? Will it save usage on the hd? Or is it just a pipe dream. I'm even wondering if I can have xp spin the drives down at night.

thanks for any advice

 

[roftranspo]

it depends on what you set the checkpoint to in the config file. And i would stay away from flash drive since you can only write so many times on them before they wear out.

 

[Mohonri]

Flash drives have a finite number of writes, but it's up in the millions now. In addition, flash drives use load spreading, which moves the data around with each write so that one specific part of the flash doesn't get worn out. Even without the load spreading, assuming checkpoint files every 15 minutes, you're still talking somewhere in the region of 30 years before you hit 1,000,000 writes on that single sector (math below). If it's using load spreading, it's even longer.

So a flash drive would be just fine. You might also consider the SMP client if you have four instances of the client. Much, much higher ppd.

The math:
15 min/write is 4 writes per hour
that's about 100 writes/day
if the flash lasts 1,000,000 writes, that's 10,000 days, or about 30 years

{(1,000,000 writes)/(24hours/day*(60min/hour)/(15min/write))}/(365 days/year) = 28.5 years