Slight problems - Outlook is slightly better now :)

[Migroo]

OK first up, I have lost 2/3 of my production in one day.

It is no longer viable to run SETI at the office any more. You might be surprised to know that this is my decision. Why? you might ask:

I came into work this morning to find:
My machine dead, and unable to boot due to a corrupt installation - Windows 2000 startup would freeze.
Our server with a dead C: drive.

I am blaming SETI for this. Hear me out - I dont believe SETI damages hardware as its just a demanding program. I blame SETI as the only reason the machines were 'on' during the night was to crunch for SETI. If they hadnt been on during the night, then they wouldnt have failed during the night. Now, I admit that its perfectly likely that for example the C: drive in the server would have failed the next day, even if I hadnt been running SETI - the fact remains that the HD died while the only process was SETI.

I have had RAM fail before - this was put down to the RAM being possibly faulty and SETI being so demanding that the fault surfaced. Fair enough - I do believe that SETI does not damage hardware, although - and this is the important point:
For me, SETI has found weaknesses in my hardware that would probably never have surfaced otherwise - I had been using ALL the hardware without problems for months before I loaded SETI, so although SETI does not damage hardware - I do believe SETI causes hardware to fail where it would otherwise not have and the outages and MONEY!spent re-installing components and OSs etc are just not worth it. :|

Another point -
I would dearly love to continue running SETI, however I need to make these points:
SETI needs to be less of a resource hog. It DOES use more than idle cycles: my machine is less responsive - not to mention Outlook... :|

SO thanks for being a great team. I would continue running SETI at my residence, however its just not worth the problems to get 3 WUs out per day. When the production added up to 15+ / day, I would put up with the slowdowns etc, but its not worth it now. I will finish the WUs I have queued at the moment.

Thanks for being a great team, the atmosphere here is brilliant. I just wish SETI was a more viable proposition.
No need to worry, my account will stay firmly in the ranks of Team Anandtech

Thanks for listening - hopefully you can understand.

Final note - Are there any safer DC projects? I hear RC5 is far less of a system hog than SETI.

 

[ShotgunSi]

First off I'm sorry for your loss, it sucks whenever ANY hardware dies on you.

Just a few things.
Were you running the CLI version on your computers? I consider the CLI to take up 100% of system resources, so there's no way I will run anything else, it would just slow SETI down. The only version that I consider to only take up "idle cycles" is the screen saver version which only kicks in when i'm not using the computer.

IMO a true server is left on 24/7 so I don't know if the components in your server were what I would consider server grade? Just a thought.

 

[Poof]

Well... SETI is very FPU intensive whereas RC5 doesn't use it. And I do know that SETI *does* assert itself more than other projects, especially ones like RC5 or UD.

As I have always told others, run what YOU like and what interests YOU. I run about 6 different projects 'cause I think they're all cool. And they inturn, feed my geeky computer hobby!

 

[Migroo]

Yes I only run the CLI. Its just faster than the GUI, so even if there are other processes running (there always are on a server) the times are going to be less than WUs processed in the GUI.

About the hardware - the drive that died is an IBM.

Thanks Poof - thats what I thought. Trouble is I am only interested in running SETI! :s

 

[Engineer]

Sorry about your troubles Migroo

You'll always be a TeAmmate...regardless of production!

Best of luck our friend....and please hang around the forums as usual....Ray won't hit much

 

[Migroo]

Thanks Engineer.

Yeah of course I'll be here. I'm just so annoyed that SETI isnt more 'PC friendly'.

 

[sduguid]

Migroo,

Was the drive an IBM 75GXP?

If so, please note that there have been an inordinate number of those drives give up the ghost. I have seen reference to that on Hardocp.com and they actually posted a link to a site which was organizing a class action suit against IBM.

Hopefully, there should be some method of compensation for the loss of your drive.

 

[Bigwoofer]

Nothing in life worth acheiving is easy.

I like the fact it pushes my systems, works out the kinks... I like to think of Seti killing a component like batteries. Do you want your batteries to sloooooooow slooooooowly all the way, or do you want it to be POW! I"M A LIGHT!" and "BAM" dead battery. So you never have to wander around limping while your pc mysteriously reboots itself because of a slowly dying component... once a day for awhile, then twice, five times, a day... over a period of weeks. Less overall downtime

Just my opinion, everybody's gottem

 

[Bigwoofer]

Oh yeah! The alternate method of you discovering your failing hd would be:

- blue screen
- reboot
- everything works fine
- blue screen
- reboot
- everything works fine for a day
- blue screen
- scandisk
- windows found errors and fixed them all
- everything works fine for 11 minutes
- blue screen...

hehe!

 

[RigorousT]

I too am sorry to hear of your loss there Mr. Migroo..

I guess I take the ultimate risk running it on my IBM ThinkPad as one of my rigs since I run it
24/7 and have for about a year.. That thinkpad costs more than my other two desktops put
together... but then again, I figure it's worth it to me.. Soon I'll pass the 1 year warranty I bought
with it and have to decide again whether it's worth the risk.

But knock on wood, so far so good.. I was really scared stiff of running SETI on it 24/7, but it's proven
to be a positive experience... infact I think I'm breaking Win98SE uptime records.. About 40 days now
running 24/7. Yeah I'd probably be where you are if it died.. but I'm a bettin' man -- and for a year it's
been behaving. I'll probably sell it soon anyway

Take your pick:
"Life is short, play hard.." "Is it in you? " "Just do it.." "Make it a bud light..."

forgot my all-time favorite: "We're right behind you. Every step of the way." -Pampers

 

[ys]

Sorry for your loss...

However, one question for the gurus, does running SETI cause HD to work hard?

 

[Migroo]

sduguid - No, I'm pretty sure the drive wasnt a 75GXP. The drive in question is a 10GB job we have had for about 2 years.

bigwoofer - Yeah thats fair enough. I can remate to the opinion, at least when it comes to my machines at home. Trouble is, the problems occur in the office - there is a days work to do, and no time to fix a PC. The PCs need to BE working and STAY working

RigourousT - Wow, pretty good uptimes :Q! Yeah, my main machine is normally fine with respects to SETI. Normally I am the cause of problems...

ys - I dont think so. However keeping the machine on to run SETI may cause the drives to stay on (obviously), that is, if you have no power management settings for the drives like instructions for them to spin down after 15 min of inactivity.

 

[Poof]

However, one question for the gurus, does running SETI cause HD to work hard?

It shouldn't.... Unless you don't have enough RAM and it starts paging. Which could mean other things are using the RAM and it gets dumped into the pagefile one too many times.

Otherwise, this latest client rarely uses the disk - and then only to write to the state file, which isn't as often as it used to with early clients.

 

[Migroo]

Thanks for clarifying Poof.

 

[RigorousT]

When I build a new computer either for myself or my friends one of the first things I do to test it out is to
run benchmarks. DC projects like SETI/RC5 make great "burn-in" test programs.. If the computer runs the
programs fine overnight or for 2-3 days without any blue screens, then you have a pretty stable system.

However, you _are_ putting your equipment to a "test".. if there is a flaw, like in your memory, you will
know it when the computer freezes after X amount of time..

That said, I don't think it adds substantial wear to any component... there's always that potential but it's not
likely. It's like driving a car.. you drive around long enough and the breaks will wear down.. the tires will need
rotatin'/replacing eventually.. but you'll trade it in or use it for parts before any of that becomes serious

 

[RaySun2Be]

Sorry for your hardware problems, and frustrations Miroo. If SETI (or any other DC project) is causing you this much grief, then I would suggest backing off, taking time off, etc.. This stuff is supposed to be FUN!

I use SETI to burn in new PCs/Servers just to make sure that they are rock solid. Since they are production machines, they do not run SETI (or any other DC project) per management request, and because of the Outlook issue, even with SETI on low priority.

Hardware fails. That's why mission critical, gotta stay up machines have redundant power supplies, hot-swappable hard drives (RAID configurations), etc.. If that PC is such a critical one, I would suggest your company invest the money in a hot-swappable, redundant configuration (dual or more CPUs, etc.) that is designed to be run 24/7, put it in a temperature controlled environment, and make sure it is connected to a good UPS, and is backed up frequently. Some companies even go as far as to having mirrored machines, so that if the main one fails, the second takes over.

/me gets down off his soapbox.

Migroo, you are welcome to hang here whether or not you decide to crunch any WUs, or move to a different DC project, or not crunch at all.

 

[ishmael2k]

Migroo,

I understand completely about the need to pull Seti off of office/work machines because of its tendancy to slow performance on some. I had to pull it from all of the office machines that are running Corel due to this. I had the option of trying to run the GUI with it working only when the sreensaver was going but decided, much like you, that it wasn't worth the risk.

I still run it on several machines at work, all ones I have built and either am using (My office PC) or donated. (I work as a facilities manager for a Baptist Church) I also take full responsiblity for the upkeep of said machines and have a backup one in case one of them dies. (Of course knowing my luck, since I run Seti on the backup machine also it will die at a critical moment... )

Hopefully you can find something else in DC that you will want to run, I have been thinking of trying RC5 on a couple of my pcs just to get a feel for it.

Rb

 

[IJump]

First,

Second, I had two (yes two) 9GB IBM drives fail in one of my most important server not too long ago. So much for RAID when two drives go down. It was messy. These had been running fine for a couple of years also. That is the way it is with computers. Maybe we will start seeing a larger number of all of IBMs drives failing. I hope not, because I only have four IBM servers with multiple hard drives to fail. I understand your reluctance to continue running SETI on "production" machines and especially servers. I run as little as possible on all 11 of my servers.

Will you at least be running at home, or are you giving up SETI totally? Are you going to try another DC project? I would hate to see anyone leave the team all together for any reason.

 

[zeruty]

<< sduguid - No, I'm pretty sure the drive wasnt a 75GXP. The drive in question is a 10GB job we have had for about 2 years. >>



IBM OEM drives have a three year warranty, and their retail drives have a... I believe 5 year warranty
make sure you RMA it
you'll probably get a bigger one back anyways
sorry to hear about the loss though

 

[medic]

We all know Seti uses your spare cycles and runs at 100% when it can, but your statement:

and this is the important point:
For me, SETI has found weaknesses in my hardware that would probably never have surfaced otherwise - I had been using ALL the hardware without problems for months before I loaded SETI, so although SETI does not damage hardware - I do believe SETI causes hardware to fail where it would otherwise not have and the outages and MONEY!spent re-installing components and OSs etc are just not worth it.

is completely without merit, I will positively guarantee that if running your CPU at 100% caused a failure then the system was marginal or about to fail anyway. I have built over a thousand systems and repaired twice that and have exposed batches of faulty hard drives and ram ect. with CPUBurn,Prime and Seti burns and have seen the exact batched hardware fail 2 hours or days to a few weeks later without any burns. Proof that Seti or burn in type programs WILL expose weak and marginal systems. The point being these marginal sysytems will fail anyway...soon.

When the components fail during your company's yearend database organization, will Photoshop or Office ect. be blamed...not likely, Seti seems to be a good target.

IMHO

 

[conjur]

to see ya go, Migroo. With you in the race to crunch 1000, I was definitely motivated to assimilate!

Have you considered a power surge of some sort to possibly be at fault?

 

[matt621]

I had 3 drives die this week and I'm not so ignorant to "blame" seti. Hardware fails because of defects in the hardware, not because you are using it. I ran a BBS for 6 years. 24hours a day, 7 days a week. In that time we had a motherboard die, 3 HD die and I never blamed the users of my board for the loss of hardware.

Anyone who blames the failure of hardware due to its use should get out of the technology business and get into politics: It's the only field where blaming one group for the faults of another group is considered rational. Maybe it's the moon's fault, after all, it was probably out then the equipment failed!

So when you quit running SETI, you better quit using your CAD program too, since I hear it's pretty demanding on your system as well. While you are at it, better stop running any FPU intensive software as well. No use taking any chances right? In fact, if you really want your hardware to "last" maybe the best thing to do is just turn it off completely. It might last forever if you do that.

 

[CraigRT]

SETI does absolutely nothing damaging to my PC nor do i notice any slow downs.. it uses up about 15MB of RAM so if you don't have the spare resources then it may hurt you, but most PC's thesedays can handle SETI in fine stride. I never notice a hint of any problems, SETI never stops running on any of my machines and they all work fine 24-7.

Sucks about your loss and hassles though, I honestly think it's just a coincidence and some bad luck though...

 

[paf077]

Sorry for your loss.!

If you want proof that IBM is making really crappy drives, contact Ford Dealers in Noth America!!!

All Mighty Ford, decided to switch to Mister Big Blue 2 years ago when the contract with HP ran out.

They had to replace 700% more hard drive in this time than HP in 10 years. Not to mention dvd drives every 2-3 months.

Wonder why they got the contact to supply and support these machine???? Cheap hardware maybe.....

And they DID NOT want to be the suppliers for the Olympics! Did not want the whole world to know of their downturn??

I'm with medic on this. cheap quality parts or cust cutting/profitmaking manufacturing is the the real culprit.

Hope you stick around here

 

[lane42]

Hi Migroo. You might want to use a cheap usb zip drive to run seti at the office. I got mine at a local micro center on sale for 39.00 dollars, or a refurb one. Just load the cli and your cache on the zip drive, and when your HD shuts off seti stay's running.