Does F@H cause disk fragmentation?

[MichaelD]

Hey,

I've noticed a disturbing trend. My HDs are becoming heavily fragmented over just a few days' time. This never happened until I started F@H.

Is this a common thing?

I'm using Diskeeper 8.0 Pro, btw.

 

[Rattledagger]

Every writing of a file bigger than the hd-cluser-size can leave to fragmentation, 4 KB cluster-size probably being the most common now.
Since folding@home writes fairly often to a file and if it's biggern than the cluser-size, you gets fragmentation.
Also, folding@home probably writes a new file & re-names instead of overwriting the old file to safe-guard against crashes, leaving a fragmented hd regardless of cluster-size.

 

[MichaelD]

Thank you, Rattledagger. Not good news, but at least I know now.

I guess I'll be removing F@H from my main gaming rig. 2.2GHz folding power lost. Can't risk having this box go down though.

 

[Rattledagger]

Uhm, in folding@home you can AFAIK configure how often it writes to disk...

Anyway, if reading your system-info correctly, it's probably a larger chance your system crashes due to the 20% overclock than you getting problems with fragmentation.

Another solution is to pick up a very cheap 1 GB or something hd and use this for folding...

Personally I'm getting more disk-fragmentation due to games than BOINC...

 

[Silverthorne]

You could always set Diskeeper to set it and forget it and let it defrag every night when you sleep.

 

[Shame]

I have a few of those small drives avail...

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[MichaelD]

Hmm. Is it a better practice to put F@H on it's own partition, instead of in the default C:\Program Files?

 

[raynman68]

I store all of my information on a network drive on that I use strictly for folding. I give each CPU it own directory ie. FAH1, FAH2, etc. that leaves my main rig free for gaming. When I have the time. Hope this my help.

Robert
And the men who hold high places
Must be the ones who start

 

[MichaelD]

Originally posted by: raynman68
I store all of my information on a network drive on that I use strictly for folding. I give each CPU it own directory ie. FAH1, FAH2, etc. that leaves my main rig free for gaming. When I have the time. Hope this my help.

Robert
And the men who hold high places
Must be the ones who start

Rob,
Could you tell me a little more about how you have it setup? What size is this network partition? NTFS file system, right? How do I tell each instance of F@H (on each box) to "do the work HERE?"

Thanks!

 

[MichaelD]

Bump.

I'd like to learn about this "save it all to a networked drive" thing.

It would be great to only have one disk to worry about, fragmentation-wise.

I could very easily do the "set and forget" w/diskeeper, but that's treating the symptom and not the cause, you know?

 

[MichaelD]

/bump

Can anyone fill me in on this "network drive" thing? It's very interesting!

 

[ICXRa]

Sounds to me like he is just installing to a networked drive that he has mapped! Interesting idea though I would like to try this myself.

 

[MichaelD]

Originally posted by: ICXRa
Sounds to me like he is just installing to a networked drive that he has mapped! Interesting idea though I would like to try this myself.

Well, the way he described it, he has F@H on different boxes, but all the info saves to a common drive, via LAN.

If I could avoid the disk fragmentation thing this way (or just contain it to ONE HD) that would be awesome.

I'm very surprised NOBODY or no FAQs mention it; but a 10GB partition (NTFS) becomes 40% fragmented in just 24 hours with F@H!!!! This is some serious stuff. That would mean a total drive failure in just a few days! What's up w/this crap?

 

[Freewolf]

I've ran seti from a folder on a networked drive before. just make a shortcut to that folder and place it in your startup file. You can run as many as as you have room on the HD. Just make a new folder and shortcut for each install you do.

 

[ICXRa]

I need to look into to this a bit more. I have F@H running on several workstations that are used every day and have not noticed any of the drives becoming that defragmented. I usually check them and defrag every couple months or so but nothing has raised a flag to me as of this time.

 

[MDE]

Originally posted by: MichaelD

Originally posted by: ICXRa
Sounds to me like he is just installing to a networked drive that he has mapped! Interesting idea though I would like to try this myself.

Well, the way he described it, he has F@H on different boxes, but all the info saves to a common drive, via LAN.

If I could avoid the disk fragmentation thing this way (or just contain it to ONE HD) that would be awesome.

I'm very surprised NOBODY or no FAQs mention it; but a 10GB partition (NTFS) becomes 40% fragmented in just 24 hours with F@H!!!! This is some serious stuff. That would mean a total drive failure in just a few days! What's up w/this crap?

My drives get hammered constantly with F@H and they're still ticking. F@H won't kill your hard drive.

 

[MichaelD]

Originally posted by: MDE

Originally posted by: MichaelD

Originally posted by: ICXRa
Sounds to me like he is just installing to a networked drive that he has mapped! Interesting idea though I would like to try this myself.

Well, the way he described it, he has F@H on different boxes, but all the info saves to a common drive, via LAN.

If I could avoid the disk fragmentation thing this way (or just contain it to ONE HD) that would be awesome.

I'm very surprised NOBODY or no FAQs mention it; but a 10GB partition (NTFS) becomes 40% fragmented in just 24 hours with F@H!!!! This is some serious stuff. That would mean a total drive failure in just a few days! What's up w/this crap?

My drives get hammered constantly with F@H and they're still ticking. F@H won't kill your hard drive.

Do they show as heavily fragmented when you analyze them, though?

 

[GLeeM]

The partition I run F@H on is no more fragmented than the other 4 partitions.

Looks like the worst culprit for me is restore. I gotta turn that off!

I sometimes fold from one of my thumb drives. The HDD can turn off and not use electricity and add heat.

 

[MichaelD]

Methinks something is wrong, then.

I just have very standard WinXP Pro installs with all the updates on all the boxes except the server. All my boxes have Spybot S&D and Spyware blaster on them and all the boxes are SAV Clients (I have a server (W2K3 Ent.) that manages them and is also crunching)

Ironically, the server uses Roxio Perfect Disk. It does NOT show the System Drive as being fragmented, yet all the client boxes that run Diskeeper Pro 8.0 DO show massive fragmentation.

I am thinking what you are...trust me, I am. BUT, Diskeeper is supposed to be "IT" AFA client defrag proggys go!!!

The reason I run Roxio on the server is b/c Diskeeper does not support 2K3 Ent.

 

[MDE]

The drive with F@H is no more fragmented than the two storage drives.

 

[OverVolt]

F@H does cause fragmentation, but the only files that get fragmented are the F@H progress saves and some of the core files on F@H. All my other files aren't affected by F@H.

 

[Rattledagger]

Except for some log-files the OS-files shouldn't change and shouldn't move at all, except due to patches from WindowsUpdate.
Folding@home will fragment itself, but total disk-space is AFAIK under 5 MB so much less than 1% of your partition, not to mention 40%.

Your web-browser & email will normally use the same partition, and as such will fragment itself.
Some new games uses every users "My Documents" for configuring/saving, and can give you the defragmentation.
If you don't download files to another disk, this also will give you fragments.

If a hd detects a bad block, the info is automatically re-assigned to a spare block. On production there is normally always some bad blocks detected, so even then your defragmenter reports no fragments the hd is already fragmented.

 

[ProviaFan]

I've been running F@H for several years, and have yet to kill a disk with it (knocks on wood).

 

[trevinom]

Using the process of deduction, it would stand to reason that if 300K+ people are folding using F@H, since they are all using the same version, or a large majority, and they have not complained about a fragmentation problem, then, the problem is not in the macrocosm, but the microcosm. ie. you have an isolated problem.

 

[JonB]

If you had a 10MB partition assigned for just F@H, it wouldn't matter if it got extremely fragmented. As long as F@H was deleting the old file after it wrote the new one, your partition would never fill up. Eventually, it would reach some sort of equilibrium defragmentation and stay the same.

If it isn't deleting old versions, then it would fill up the partition. Nobody's mentioned that as a problem, so that probably isn't it.