Yes, I posted this thread as sort of a warning to XS crunchers. CEP2 has alot of HD activity and with the number of people running 980x's and SR2's here this information needs to be known. In the past you could run any old crappy HD on a beast of a rig and it would crunch just fine. That's not the case with CEP2. A mechanical drive can only handle about 4 concurrent CEP work units before you start losing CPU efficiency. Once you get to 8 or 12 of these runing at the same time, you lose alot of efficiency and risk OS crashes and WU errors.

Speaking of errors, the rig in the OP with the mechanical HD starting throwing "Task exited with zero status but no finished file - Restarting" errors today. I'll limit CEP2 to 4-5 threads till the SSD I ordered for it shows up next week.

Quote Originally Posted by haschioz View Post
so what exactly does this tell us? a ssd is better for crunching? and the times clockspeed wise dont add up...your 3.8ghz machine is faster than it should be, maybe post a couple days of runtime and post them again with a similar clocked machine hdd vs ssd to compare.
SSD's are better for this particular project (CEP2). With all the others, HD speed doesn't make any difference.

Also, CEP2 work units are variable length so completion time is not and idicator of CPU speed.