Crunching on SSDs: What you need to know

[BlindFreddie]

My 2c worth ...

• I don't know whether the BOINC time-between-disc-writes setting has any effect. The HDD activity LEDs on most of my crunchers often blink every second a lot of the time. Also, it may be up to the WCG science program to choose when to write checkpoint info, and it may ignore the BOINC setting.
• Some WCG sciences seem to treat the swap partition/file/pagefile as extended RAM, and access it very often, so it might be wise to move this partition/file onto a magnetic or RAM drive. In particular DDDT-2, which runs the QCHEMM program, does this. I suspect that the forthcoming Windows version of CEP-2 will do the same, as during the recent beta test, crunchers were experiencing the same symptoms of tasks crashing with timeouts on disc waits as happened to me with DDDT-2/XP/WD Caviar Green w 32MB onboard buffer. My workaround was to upgrade the system disk to a 10-yo 8.4GB Seagate IDE drive that gets off its a*se and writes sectors to disc as soon as requests arrive. No apparent speed penalty as the OS disc cache, interrupt-processing and DMA take care of things. Slow to boot up? Crunchers don't have to boot up - they never turn their machines off. And the drive just went prmp, prmp, prmp, every second, writing the updates, ignoring the BOINC setting. I don't think I'd see a work throughput improvement with an SSD.
• Sorry, jcool, but I don't understand partition "alignment". With a mag. drive, one normally aligns to cylinder boundaries, tho this probably has no advantages as far as the hardware is concerned. Is your magic number the SSD equivalent? Are there any other sizes? What would the DOS or *nix fdisk program say about an "aligned" partition?
• The Intel RAID driver software has a function even if you do not run RAID - it enables and is necessary for running SATA drives in AHCI mode (XP). You can install it with XP post OS-installation, but you need to patch the registry with a chipset-dependent magic number. I found info at http://forum.msi.com.tw/index.php?topic=106575.0 but that's not online right now. (I might have saved a copy somewhere. Also, the location of the Intel software has changed).

PS: @jcool - I can't read the yellow text in your 1st post, against the yellow background used by the XS forum, unless I select the text so it shows white against blue. Bad choice of colour, mate.