Folding Forum

I use a Dell Inspiron PC with a SSD for progs. and a HDD for data.

I was wondering if the Folding at Homeprog. should be located on the HDD
rather than the SSD as constant use of the SSD will wear it out fairly quickly.

I haven't been able to located it myself, can someone please advise?

FAH does not make heavy use of the storage device but because it generally is configured to run 24x7 it's disk usage is certainly in the "medium" range. You can put it on either.

Depending on how large your SSD drive is, and if the system is only used for FAH.
But any cheap $25 SSD drive (64GB or more) should last you many years, if not a decade or more; if only used for FAH.
eMMC drives (sometimes confused with SSDs), are much smaller and slower.
You'll need at least 16GB of free space for both OS and FAH (32GB of free space is preferred for Windows).

Any more space, and the drive should only last longer.
Harddrives are probably lasting less long than SSD drives in that matter.

Out of laziness and a childish desire for speed and simplicity, I fitted my dedicated F@H rig built in April with only a 256MiB M.2 card. I barely use it except for folding. We’ll see what happens.

In general, unless you are an extraordinarily heavy data rewriter, an SSD will last far longer than its technical life span. That is, you will likely get a newer/bigger/faster one before it wears out. SSDs have evolved significantly (e.g., TRIM, wear leveling, garbage collection...) since they became mainstream.

As an example, my Samsung 860EVO 1TB SSD on an older computer has a 5-year warranty and is rated at 600TB written. That means the drive can be totally filled and erased 600 times. In 18 months I have written 7.4TB to it, or about 5TB/year. So it has over 118 years left at that rate! Even ff you have a "small" 250GB SSD, it would last 30 years at that rate.

My newer Corsair MP600 2TB SSD still has a 5-year warranty, but is rated at 3600TB written (3x the older Samsung, relative to size), and I have written 4.4TB to it in 8 months, or about 6.6 TB/year, for a 545-year endurance.

Welcome to the F@H Forum Viktring,

In addition to what others have mentioned above, it might be worth reading this experiment about SSD longevity so you can make an informed decision: https://techreport.com/review/27909/the ... -all-dead/

Since you mentioned Dell, I shall assume that you're running a Windows OS. The best way to change the directory is you set your client to Finish. Once all the WUs have finished folding, you make a note of your username/team/passkey in plain text and then uninstall the client selecting the option to delete the data. You can then perform an installation and select Advanced to specify the custom directory which could be D:\FAHData in your case. Just ensure that whatever folder you use for F@H, it should be empty to begin with and don't store any other data in that folder.

On Windows, you can use SsdReady to monitor your writes. The free version will do.
http://www.ssdready.com/ssdready/
On Linux, you use "iostat".

I don't know about the CPU writes, but an RX 570 folding P13422 on a Win7 64-bit machine writes a total of about 48 GB/day.
I expect half of those are system writes, as to the log files, etc.

The SSD (a Samsung 850 Pro 128 GB) is estimated to last 4.3 years by SsdReady, but I think that is very conservative. It will probably be at least 10 times that.
I use the Samsung Rapid Mode cache (part of their Magician utility) to provide a write-cache that protects the drive from high writes.

If you have a spinning harddrive, you might as well put the FAH work directory on it rather than on the SSD. As said above, SSDs last very long these days, but there is also no real benefit to put the FAH directory on the SSD if the harddrive is spinning already.

gunnarre wrote:If you have a spinning harddrive, you might as well put the FAH work directory on it rather than on the SSD. As said above, SSDs last very long these days, but there is also no real benefit to put the FAH directory on the SSD if the harddrive is spinning already.

Speed.
The main benefit is reduction in read latency.
It won't affect folding by much, but there's a difference; much like loading a game.
I would leave the OS and FAH on an SSD, and use the HDD for large data files, like archives, movies, and downloaded data.

gunnarre wrote:... if the harddrive is spinning already.

Does anybody actually set their HD to spin down when it's inactive? Maybe that extends the life of the bearings, but saving 2 or 3W is hardly worth it.

It is claimed that spinning up and down drives a lot increases wear more than just letting them spin. But if you have a couple of 3.5" 7200 RPM drives which only spin up for backups or something, then spinning them down might be worth it.

bruce wrote:

gunnarre wrote:... if the harddrive is spinning already.

Does anybody actually set their HD to spin down when it's inactive? Maybe that extends the life of the bearings, but saving 2 or 3W is hardly worth it.

Considering that FAH writes to disk about once a minute per WU, I don't think this will be feasible.
unless there's a way to do everything in RAM (from downloading a WU, to processing, to uploading the results; but that wouldn't work either when the power goes down, losing all that progress)...

MeeLee wrote:...unless there's a way to do everything in RAM (from downloading a WU, to processing, to uploading the results; but that wouldn't work either when the power goes down, losing all that progress)...

I am aware of software that use RAM Caching and have used it in the past to get insane performance. However, any loss in power and all that data is lost unless you have secondary power to ensure that during a power loss, you can safely write all the data from the RAM cache and then power down your system.

MeeLee wrote:Considering that FAH writes to disk about once a minute per WU, I don't think this will be feasible.

Putting spindown on the disk with your FAH work directory is a bad idea, yes - we were mostly talking here about what to do with a system which has both SSDs and spinning drives in it. If you have a spinning harddrive (like a drive where a Linux /var or Windows home directory resides), then you can put your FAH work folder on that drive to reduce SSD wear a little bit - but if your harddrive only holds rarely accessed files and is spun down most of the day, then go ahead and put the FAH work directory on the SSD.

I have run FAH on a RAM drive, but that was on a system without persistent storage, and I'm not doing it anymore.

Thanks to everyone who responded; SSDs appear to have improved markedly.