Laptop crunching from thumb drive

[deez]

I use my P4M 2.2 laptop as an occasional cruncher but I recently put all the SETI files on a thumb drive. Since I started running SETI with files on thumb drive my times seem to have dropped by .10 hours per WU. Times are just under 3.6 hours per WU with 3.03 client.

Laptop is Toshiba Tecra, OS is XP Pro, 768Mb PC2100

Its a USB 1.1 thumb drive (64mb) with USB 2.0 port on laptop.

Anybody else doing this? I figured it would keep the hard-drive spinning less and since its a slow RPM drive it may have helped my times.

[eaglescouter]

Yes I ran 3 of these for a few months, one usb thumb drive died during the process, but otherwise it works very nicely.

[TC]

I used a pcmcia flash card for a while and it was actually slower than the hard drive. What's more, it seemed like windows 2000 considered it a physical hard disk, so the power management applied to it as well. Consequently it kept my physical hard disk powered up even though it wasn't being accessed.

[Greg M]

It was way slower for me. It's a good way to kill a thumb drive, too. They're usually only good for about 1000 writes.

[deez]

This thumb drive has already been through the washing machine once and it still works so I'm not exactly worried about longevity. I'm only using it temporarily for crunching on my laptop at home but I might start taking it to work too and running it on an rarely used system during the day.

I lost my temporary 3Gig HT P4 cruncher @work cuz its being used for video encoding/decoding now so I could use the xtra WU's.

my boss is cool with me crunching on unused systems so I'll be doing my best to get anything possible running again. Too much :beer: has made me a lazy cruncher lately. :D

[elec999]

How do you guys run seti off thumb drives. Did you install the os to the thumbdrive and boot from it. Would windows 95 be good enough for seti, and should 32meg thumbdrive be enough.
Thanks

[Tyrinon]

Win95 would work for phase one of seti, but you would have to get the winsock2 upgrade for your os. The client uses about 16mb ram when running, so I don't see why it wouldn't work on that 32mb thumbdrive.

I could be wrong about the thumbdrive, because I don't use any... Hope that helps. :)

[elec999]

How can I boot of USb thumb and install windows on it.

[eaglescouter]

You do not need to boot from the thumb drive to run seti on it.

Just install the CLC files to the thumb drive, and activate the exe file from the thumb drive. Easy as pie.

[elec999]

You do not need to boot from the thumb drive to run seti on it.

Just install the CLC files to the thumb drive, and activate the exe file from the thumb drive. Easy as pie.
I had that idea in mind, but if I do this, I cant run diskless. I would love to run diskless.

[deez]

If you have a big enough thrumb drive then any of the diskless cruncher methods should work from that too as long as you can boot from USB

but I'm just running Windows and keeping the client, driver and spy on the thumb drive