Slightly OT: Computer Power Management..

[dawks]

I have three harddrives in my system, one of which is a 10,000 RPM WD Raptor. As such, since my computer is on 24/7 running DC programs, I like to cut its power use as much as possible. The two main, and easiest ways are having the monitor and harddrives automatically shut down by Windows Power Management. This works to a certain extent. My two data drives shut down and stay sleeping pretty well the whole time I am AFK. The drive that holds Windows, my pagefile, and Rosetta@home, only seems to sleep a small portion of the time. It seems every 20-25 minutes or so, the drive will sleep for about 3-4 minutes, then spin back up, and run for another 15-25 minutes. This continual spinning up puts unnecesary wear on the drive, and wastes electricity, maybe more then the whole process saves.

So is there a way to keep the drive sleeping longer? I've tried setting up a RAM disc and installing the DC program on it, but it doesn't seem to help much, I'm guessing since the ram disc or other programs are accessing the pagefile possibly. Is there some other way? I used to keep my pagefile on a separte physical disc then the DC program was installed to, but with that situation, I noticed both physical discs would spin up regularly.

A quick note, I'm running a UPS so I'm not afraid of keeping everything in RAM. If my power is out long enough that my system sucks the UPS dry, then it doesnt need to be running anyway.

I've heard that Vista should have better control with power management and its going to be less friendly towards letting random applications wake up hardware. But in the meantime, I'm looking for another possible solution.

 

[Ken g6]

There's a BOINC setting in General Settings: "Write to disk at most every xxx seconds". I just tried setting it to 86400 seconds, 1 full day, and the Rosetta site didn't complain. So unless there's another process using the disk (e.g. changing Rosetta WUs, or something else like a firewall log) the disk should shut down.

On the other hand, the HDDs I've left running tend to last longer than those I spin down. So you might want to set the time shorter to make sure the drive stays spun up.

 

[GLeeM]

Your account in BOINC has a setting "Write to disk at most every" and you say how many seconds you want. I don't know what the optimum setting for R@H would be or if you set it too long if it will adversly affect how well the program runs.

F@H checkpoints can be set to longer than the default 15 minutes by entering configure again.

 

[dawks]

Originally posted by: GLeeM
Your account in BOINC has a setting "Write to disk at most every" and you say how many seconds you want. I don't know what the optimum setting for R@H would be or if you set it too long if it will adversly affect how well the program runs.

F@H checkpoints can be set to longer than the default 15 minutes by entering configure again.

Thanks guys, I will try the setting in Rosetta@home.

The Folding@Home check points makes no difference. I think it may be due to Virtual Memory and pagefile access.

 

[dawks]

Well I've tried adjusting the Rosetta@Home settings and it has had no effect. My main HD, (the raptor with Windows, R@H, and the pagefile) will not sleep long. It runs for about 7-10 minutes, then spins down and will stay asleep for about 5-20 seconds then spin back up and continue running for another 7-10 minutes before sleeping again. I can tell for sure as for the last three evenings I've been sitting a few feet away from my box using my laptop and I can clearly hear its waking and sleeping.

I've always had this problem with Windows Power Management, as far back as Win98, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Is there any better solution? Perhaps a tool that can better manage the system? I've heard Vista has much better control, but my current hardware is not compatible (read: nForce2 chipset - damn nVidia). I might purchase a new system in the spring, but I'd like a fix now. This has been going on for years I'm sure and its actually questionable as to whether I'm actually saving power or not, and it's sure wearing the drive down.

 

[Ken g6]

Here's a weird idea. Are you comfortable with Linux? If so:

1. Get a Linux LiveCD. Just about any will do. This should work, I think.
2. Launch the LiveCD, and download and install BOINC for Linux. If you do this in /tmp, it should stay in RAM.
3. Copy the BOINC folder to your hard drive, so you don't have to install BOINC again later.
4. Run BOINC.
5. When done running BOINC from Linux for awhile, be sure to copy your BOINC folder to your hard drive, so you don't lose your work.

The good news is, it won't wear your hard drive out. The bad news is, switching between Linux and Windows might wear you out.

 

[BlackMountainCow]

@dawks: I notice the same thing with my computers. The "write to disk" setting in BOINC never really had any effect for me either. One thing, though, that really helped a lot was to diasble the pagefile. Now, this will most likely cost you a lot of performance, no matter how large your mem is. But I tried it once just to see and my HD writes went down a lot. It's not really tjhe thing you were looking for.

Is it possible to set the pagefile on a RAM drive (having some 2 GB of RAM available), or das the pagefile have to be on a physical HD?

 

[dawks]

Howdy boys

@Ken: The box in question here is actually my main use PC, homework, movies, downloading, gaming and its my TV (Media Center) so linux is a no go. In the future when I am done school I'll probably get a few dedicated boxes, at which point, I'd definitely look for something like that, I'd probably only have a flash drive for storage besides RAM in them (if possible).

I came across an application from sysinternal's, recently purchased by Microsoft, called filemon.exe, which lets you view all the filesystem activities. You can see which process is accessing the disk, and what its doing. Pretty neat tool. Even with setting R@A to only access the disk every 4+ hours, its still writing to several files every minute or two, so thats part of the problem, but additionally, many Windows services occasionally access the disc for some reason. I think this is just a flaw with the way everything is setup, and not much can be done about it for the time being. As I said before, I think Microsoft did some work on this for Vista, so I hope it will improve in the future. They may be doing things like asking applications to do their read/writes before the drive sleeps, and then just caching program read/write requests until the disk should be woken up at a later time.

As for putting the pagefile into a RAM disk.. That might technically work, but you probably wouldn't want to do much more with the PC then run distributed projects on it.

 

[Insidious]

HiYa Dawks

I don't really think you're going to have much luck running a computational program 24/7 on your PC without it needing to access your HDs, unless your PC is so crippled that it can't do much of anything else.

Also, shutting down those drives and then starting them up again several times an hour is going to cost you more in HD replacement costs than you are going to save in electric bills. (IMO)

Ridding your system of cooling fans will save you more electricity (again, IMO). Maybe fanless coolers and leaving the side off your case. But again, you'll have to save a lot of electricity to offset the price of the 'exotic' coolers.

-Sid

Afterthought: You could underclock your system allowing reduced voltage settings, but again.... self defeating. (Yes, still just my opinion)

 

[mondobyte]

If you are running Windows 2000-XP-2003 ... the OS reads and writes to the swap file all the time unless the computer is "Hibernated". As far as I know, there is no way to suspend swap file activity. If you choose to run without a swap file, then performance will suffer and windows will still create a temporary swap file so you don't get anywhere closer to your goal.

Now ... how to get around this issue ... but performance will be awful on the computer ...

Buy the largest USB Flash Drive you can find (Office Max has 2gb ones on sale for 39.95) ... put your TEMP, SWAP FILES and BOINC on that flash drive.

Know this though ... Flash Drives have a limit on how many read/write cycles before failure. Typically, one does not use a slow media such as this for such data intensive use. Depending on the USB key ... this failure limit may be long enough to make this a viable choice.

One way to minimize swap file use is to increase your memory and increase your cache size as well as to force core components to remain in memory. There are registry settings for these.
Mondo.

"Like all flash memory devices, flash drives can sustain only a limited number of write and erase cycles before failure. Mid-range flash drives under normal conditions will support several hundred thousand cycles, although write operations will gradually slow as the device ages. This should be a consideration when using a flash drive to run application software or an operating system. To address this, as well as space limitations, some developers have produced special versions of operating systems (such as Linux) or commonplace applications (such as Mozilla Firefox) designed to run from flash drives. These are typically optimized for size and configured to place temporary or intermediate files in memory rather than store them temporarily on the flash drive."