How does RC5 affect my power management settings?

[toph99]

i have my hard drive set to spin down after 25 minutes of inactivity, but does rc5 writting and reading the buffers stop this from happening? it's a new hdd and i don't want it to wear out early

thanks

 

[Nohr]

It's the starting up that puts the most wear on the drive. It works the motor and also puts some thermal stress on the drive (going from a relatively cool room temperature up to operating temperature rather quickly). I just keep my computers hard drives on all the time and don't worry about it too much.

 

[toph99]

yeah, but i don't jump on and off a whole lot. the computer's idle for a good 10 hours or more a day, so i think it would put less stress on it this way, only having to spin up once or twice a day

 

[Nohr]

That works. I'm usually off and on the computer all day long, so just leaving everything on works out better for me. I do turn off the monitor when I won't be using the computer for a little bit though.

I would think that the dnet client would wake up the hard drive (or any other program running that needed it), but I really can't say for sure. I've never played with the power management settings since I haven't had much use for them.

 

[toph99]

if it does, i wonder if there's any way to commit the block to memory until the computer comes back from idle?

 

[Nohr]

You could try setting up a ramdisk, copy the dnet client files to it and run it from there.

 

[toph99]

what is ramdisk?

 

[RaySun2Be]

I think a better question should be - What power settings affect RC5?

 

[Nohr]

Yeah really Ray.

A ramdisk is a virtual hard drive in ram. Like if you have 128MB of ram, you could take a small portion of that (say 4MB, though you wouldn't need nearly that much for the dnet client) and turn it in to temporary hard drive space. It would be assigned it's own drive letter, E: for instance. Then you could create directories on it and copy files over and whatnot, just like any other writeable drive. The main reason for using a ramdisk is it's sheer speed. Since it's in ram it's much faster than any hard drive could be, but it's only temporary. When you turn off your computer anything on a ramdisk is erased unless you copied it to a different drive beforehand. Windows won't do this on it's own so you'd need to download a program that does it. Can't really suggest any though, I've only used ramdisks in dos.

 

[toph99]

i'll take a look into it, thanks for the info

 

[Slahr Dzhe]

You can set your client to buffer in RAM(No disk I/O). It should be option 1 in the Buffer and Buffer Update options menu.
Keep in mind that if you lose power, you lose everything that you were working on and your buff-in and buff-out files.

SD

 

[NicColt]

I have mine on a 5 hour delay, and no system standby, just the monitor goes off after 25 min with no screen saver.

 

[Kilowatt]

In my humble opinion, it's easier on the hard drive to leave it spinning then it is to start & stop it 15+ times a day.

Thermal expansion and contraction are harder on the drive then leaving it spinning.
Hard drives today are built much better then they were a couple years ago.

The only exception would be if you aren't going to use the machine at all for the night, and go ahead and shut it down for 8 hours or so.
But that will kill your keyrate :Q not a good thing

 

[TheJoker]

So what your saying is my running RC5 with the default option (no buffering to ram) just could be saving my hard drive...

 

[Kilowatt]

That brings up a good point.

Buffering into ram will defiantly reduce the I/O thrashing of the HDD, but chances are you are also running a checkfile on a regular (used everyday) box and so you are still writing to the drive every few minuets or what ever.
I don't really know how often the checkfile backs up your work process. (Does anyone know?)

A 32*2^28 packet takes "0.01:24:38.89 - [1,691,314.10 keys/sec]" on my PIII600, so buffering in ram with out a checkfile would write to the HDD every 1½ hours or so.
If the HDD was set to spin down after 25min, it would rest for about an hour (providing nothing else writes to it) before spinning up again.
If you received nothing but 32*2^28 packets, you'll still be reading and writing to the drive 16 times a day.
(it's a guesstimate, OK? Don't get precise on me)
Now, since my particular machine is a dually, it's twice again as much (or so) of I/O to the HDD.

In conclusion, it's better IMHO to just leave the drive spinning.

 

[toph99]

the reason i was wondering was because i'm going away on vacation for a week, and was going to leave both of my main crackers on, so i was hoping to save my hdd a little and let it spin down for the 7 days i'm away does anyone know how to shut off window's little checks that it does every so often? because i'm going to shut off everything except the dnet client, and if i can get it to buffer to memory(it is connected to the net 24/7) i'd like it to do that i'd use ramdisk but i'm leaving tomorrow and i have things to do today.

thanks for the input guys

 

[Sukhoi]

I'd go for atleast an hour wait for a hard drive spin down...spinning up is one of the harder things for a hard drive to do, so you don't want it spinning up multiple times a day. Anyway, hard drives take very little power. My Western Digital 30 GB 7200 RPM drive uses about 10 watts idle.

 

[Nohr]

Checkpoint file info straight from dnet's Faq-O-Matic: "This checkpoint file will keep track of your work and update itself every few minutes."

 

[Nohr]

BTW toph99, happy birthday.

 

[toph99]

thanks Nohr, and also thanks for the info well i'm off on vacation(had to check the forums one last time, won't see them for a week )

bye everyone