Way back in December, not long after I had a new motherboard installed in my old Compaq machine, I grumbled that the hard drive was spinning like crazy and that I couldn’t find an explanation. Despite running three or four of the most widely-known anti-malware programs and clearing one potential virus, I couldn’t get it to stop.
This week the new HP machine started doing the same thing. However, I now know why. On every machine I’ve owned since the old Packard Bell back in 2001 I’ve run Berkeley’s SETI@home distributed computing software; a few years later I added another distributed computing module called Rosetta@home.
When I bought this machine in May of this year I forgot to install those programs on it, so they haven’t been running in the background. The other day I got a reminder notice from the SETI folks saying “You haven’t done anything for 82 days. Is something wrong?” “Oh yeah,” I said to myself. “I forgot those.” I went to the BOINC site to re-acquire the software and started it up.
A week later the hard drive started spinning like crazy. I asked myself “What new thing has been installed which might cause this?” and disabled the BOINC software. Bingo. No more continuous activity from the hard drive.
It’s a shame, because it gave me great geeky pleasure to think of my computer being the one which analyzed the specific data which proved ET’s existence, or the data which might find a protein which helps treat a nasty disease. I just can’t stand the noise and I worry about the wear and tear on the head above the hard drive.
Is anyone else running anything from BOINC? Have you noticed this hard drive activity?
I’ve been running Rosetta@home for several years now. It eats a lot of memory and occasionally CPU (I had major problems with it on my old XP box with only 512KB memory, until I upgraded), but I don’t notice it spinning the disk unusually.
Erm, I just realized I suspended the Rosetta project 2 weeks ago (just before leaving for the Bach festival – or maybe it was before leaving on vacation in June!) and never restarted it! I just restarted it, I usually run 4 tasks at once (one for each core). I stand by my statement that I never notice heavy disk activity, but then my current drive is virtually silent. How do you tell?
For one thing, the box is on the desk eight inches from the monitor and 18 inches from my head. It’s a quite audible increase of sound from the normal silence, a quick spinning up of the drive which goes on for half-a-minute or so.
Well, if disk noise really bothers you and you are determined to participate, you could run those “at-home” applications off of a SSDD.