What's the minimum required size storage media for a dedicated Rosetta@home number crunching machine? I had been looking at cheap 32 and 64 GB ssds, knowing that the hard drive read/write speed isn't really a bottleneck at all for what I need them for (when I was doing this I was thinking of putting together a dedicated folding@home rig, please correct me if this is not true for Rosetta@home)

I decided to ask this question on both forums in case I wanted to use it for this project instead and a choice made in building around the other one was a bad choice for this one.

I know that the work units can take up significant RAM in Rosetta, but what kind of size files will be on the hard drive and what is the minimum I can get away with? Wanting to save as much as I can on the drive to put it where it counts, more processing power.

What's the minimum required size storage media for a dedicated Rosetta@home number crunching machine?

It depends on how many cores & threads you use, and how much RAM you have, and the size of you cache.
Generally allow 1GB drive space for each Task (1 per core/thread) you plan to process at a time. And make sure to allow at least 1.5GB RAM for each Task you plan to run at a time. Some use (a lot ) more, some use (a lot) less, but with that as an average you're unlikely to ever run in to any out of memory issues.

I had been looking at cheap 32 and 64 GB ssds,

I didn't think they made any that size, and even if they did i wouldn't use them. And i would not use any sort of CF or USB Thumb drive (unless it was 120GB or larger) to store data on any sort of PC crunching system. Not a problem for low powered systems with low core counts, but even the lower end x86 CPUs with limited cores will do a lot of work, and that means disk writes.

You want plenty of unused spare space- that allows the SSD's garbage collection to work efficiently & reduces write amplification. Plenty of spare space means even applications that write to a drive far more than Rosetta ever will would still not significantly impact the the drive's life expectancy.

120GB is the smallest i would consider using, but given it's only a few dollars more for a 240GB (let alone a 480-500GB SSD) that's the minimum i'd personally go with. And the larger capacity drives perform batter than smaller capacity drives, and the more cores & threads you process with the harder the drive has to work. And you don't want the system bottlenecked by it's storage I/O.

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Grant
Darwin NT