The disk utilization tab on BOINC tells me that the Climateprediction project and SETI@home are using 88.6 MB and 3.31 MB, respectively. My hard drive is grinding away constantly to carry out their routines. My question is this: Since I have 2 GB of RAM, why use the hard drive at all. Could not these programs be run totally in RAM to avoid unnecessary wear and tear on the hard drive?

riserman

It should not be constant, but the drive is used to write at step points, so that if a crash, shutdown, etc. happens, you would not lose where the file was at the time that the crash happened, and have to do all that work over. Especially for Climate. No one would ever finish a model.

There is a change in your account, under General Preferences, that you can change the write to disk at most... It\'s 60 seconds as default. I have seen varying ideas, but many have decided that a 300 second (5 minute) interval is a good spot to set it to.

What else is running at the same time? Are you running into utilizing a lot of swap space?

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