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will power savings affect seti?

S

smp

Diamond Member
Hi... my old man is breaking my nuts about leaving my machine on over night. He says that it wastes power, he heard on TV that it costs 8 cents an hour (I know, I know shutup) and that it adds up and is a waste. So if I try to ease his mind, can I enable some power saving? Like, offing the hhd stuff? I turn my monitor off at night.. would the hhd power saving affect seti? And who says that seti isn't just echelon? I don't know, do you?
doo doo doo doooooooo
 
Turning off the hard drive might be possible if you can set up a ram disk to run the program and work unit in, but then you'd need to be concerned about power fluctuations as a simple *blink* would cause any work done to be lost without a UPS to keep the PC running.
 
Seti has to write a state file every so often to disk... otherwise, it runs completely in RAM...

I'm not sure what the effect is if your drive has to keep spinning up and then back down to write that file... In your case, perhaps a RAM disk would actually be justifiable, and then have some kind of scheduled task run to save the state.sah file to disk somewhere...

Alternately, you could run seti off a floppy (having it save the state.sah there), and then have the HD power down.
 
IS it 8 cent with or without the monitor on? The monitor is what accounts for the majority of the power used. On it own, PCs don't use that much.

Windogg
 
Yeah, that 8 cent figure has to be including the monitor, because the PC should be using less than a penny an hour. Monitors are the real power-users!

JHutch
 
Yeah, just turn off the monitor and you'll save a lot of money. Remember that a TV is basically a big monitor...it's not fair to compare a TV to a computer (without the monitor).
 
Haha Sukhoi, I hope you didn't misunderstand the question, he saw on the tv that it costs 8 cents an hour.. note, this is CND money... Windogg, so less than a penny an hour US is like 8 cents CDN an hour.. 😱 Oh well, I'm sure it won't make any difference on our bill if I power down the hhd anyways.. whatever, I think that the five case fans do most of the power consumption in my PC anyways (after the monitor, which I power down).. so thanks all.
 
Also, I wouldn't consider spinning down your hard drive unless you run SETI in a ramdisk and have it set for really long save times (like 12 hours). It's not good for a hard drive to spin up and down a lot, so having it spin up and down all the time while SETI is running isn't a good idea.

Hard drives barely take any power at idle either. My Western Digital 30 GB 7200 RPM HDD only takes 7 watts of power at idle. 🙂
 
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