I reinstalled BOINC last night after not having run it in quite some time.

I noticed pretty quickly that no matter what I set in preferences my hard drive seems to spin up and down in rapid succession. I can hear it spin all the way up, then right back down within a second or two, only to spin back up just as quickly.

Is this a settings issue somewhere that I've failed to locate? I would love to keep running BOINC, but not if it's going to be at the cost of wearing out my drive from the constant up and down, and I'll have to abort my plans to install it on my 3 servers as well...

I'm running a quad core(AMD Phenom 9650), with 8GB of DDR2 RAM.

I assume you run some form of Windows. What do you have set for that drive to do in the Power options in Control Panel?

BOINC writes to disk regularly, updating various files. You better not tell the OS to power down the disk(s) to save energy.

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Are you sure it's the hard drive spinning up? I find it hard to tell if disks are even powered up, the modern ones are so quiet: and it would be very unusual for disks to spin up and down so quickly - the power-saving timeouts are usually measured in minutes rather than seconds, even for a laptop.

The noisy bits of the computer - the ones you can hear - are usually fans.

If Richard's guess is right, it's the setting of the "Use at most XX percent of CPU time" preference with XX lower than 100 what's causing the fans to act up as described.

Gruß,
Gundolf

I already responded here, it seems my post was eaten.

You were right, it's the fan spinning up and down.

My concern is still the same however. I don't want to wear out my CPU fan prematurely, and I certainly won't even think about putting this on my servers before I can work this out.

Any help?

Alternate, setting BOINC to 50% makes the control run in 1 second intervals. This way temps also stay fairly constant so that your fans will not respond that violently.

Another alternative would be to set 50% (or 75%) of processor count instead of CPU time.

Gruß,
Gundolf

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Computer sind nicht alles im Leben. (Kleiner Scherz)

Thanks for the suggestions folks.

I looked at TThrottle, but I don't like the idea of having to run a second utility just to keep BOINC from beating the heck out of my system.

I wound up dropping the max processor time to 25%(any higher and the problem persists), and dropped the process priority to low in the task manager. This seems to have done the trick. Hopefully the changes I made will continue to keep this from happening, if not I'm just going to have to uninstall and abandon any thoughts of installing on my servers :(

I pulled my system apart and it wasn't particularly dusty in there.

After weeks of messing with the settings and trying to keep this from happening, I give up. I've turned BOINC off completely, and will likely uninstall it and try back again in a year or two...

It is a shame, I'd love to help out, but the original concept of BOINC didn't include tearing my system up :(

Before you uninstall, please navigate to your BOINC Data directory, open global_prefs.xml with Notepad, then copy everything and post it here.
Do the same for global_prefs_override.xml if it exists.

With thanks.

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