Hi folks,

I finally decided to put one workstation into BOINC use, but it will run mostly under Win10 (dual boot with Ubuntu). I left the windows universe a long time ago and my recent encounters with win10 are not as smooth as on Win7. So can you give some advice how to properly set win10 and Boinc so I run CPDN fine.

The machine is HP Z620 - Six core Xeon E5-2630 v2 @ 2.6 GHZ (up to 12 threats)
16 GB DDR3 ECC 1333 MHz (8x2Gb modules) (not able to put more for the moment)
SSD 512 GB - Samsung Pro
1T, 2T and 4T HHDs
Quadro K2000

The machine will be used for running some air quality modelling - hence the 6TB HDDs, but when free BOINC will occupy it.

Haven't partitioned it yet but Win 10 Pro is installed on the SSD
Ubuntu will be also on the SSD (but most probably /var and Boinc data will be on the HHDs, unless nowadays it is safe to crunch on the SSD)
AntiVirus - not sure there is such, but I may need to put one (free version). I remember that I should tell AV to skip looking in Boinc data dir, but is it still the case?
Any advice on WIN10 Pro update policy?
Any other advice?

Thanks in advance

Based on forums (fora?) here and in other places, it is still worth excluding boinc data and program directories from av scans. I would probably not use more than 8 threads at once given the current advice to have 2GB ram/core. (This may well increase given the increasing complexity of some of the models used.)

I think given your experience, anything else I can tell you will be common sense to you. - I have been windows free this century!

WRT updates on Win10. Unless you tell it otherwise through the local policies it will update automatically and reboot at odd times. Google "Win10 update policies" for tips on how to change things. It does unfortunately mean fiddling with parts of the registry but does seem to work. You can set when and how updates are notified and you can also set that you download and install them. For AV I use Windows own built in one. Its not the best but it does a good job for a free one. I would also install BOINC on one of the HHDs rather than the SSD. My guess is with big models there will be lots of disc writes.

Thank you both,

Still wondering about how to partition and whether to use the SSD. Do I have to install the whole boinc on HDD or I can put only the Data dir on the HDD (this is for the Win10 set up)?

I had BOINC running on my netbook on an SSD till it was finally pensioned off and given to a friend recently. On my laptop again Linux) I have had it running on the SSD (both data and programs) for over three years now without issue. I think modern SSD's are robust enough to cope with the number of write cycles. My only caveat would be that I would advise caution if the SSD were only 64 GB as then once the OS was installed, there wouldn't be that much space and the same parts of the disk would be getting hammered all the time.

Thank you both,

Still wondering about how to partition and whether to use the SSD. Do I have to install the whole boinc on HDD or I can put only the Data dir on the HDD (this is for the Win10 set up)?

If you have both SSD and HDD, I would put the data directory on the HDD. The program directory is not written to enough (at all?) to worry about it. Multiple cores running multiple big models at high speeds will write a lot of data to disk in a short period of time. There's no real speed advantage for cpdn in running from a SSD so you might as well use your HDD.

Thanks geophi,

I have 3 HDDs with over 4 TB for that machine. I thought that SSD could help with writing if multiple models need to write simultaneously but I would spare the SSD from boinc then.