In order not to overtax my SSD with the current stress test project from WordCommunityGrid, I decided to do what I had done already a few years ago when I participated in a project with enormous amounts of data written to the SSD: I shifted BOINC over to an external USB3-disk. And that worked out very well (although I had to accept the lower speed, of course)

However, this time it did not seem to work. The BOINC manager gets disconnected every few minutes and needs to get reconnected manually.
So I must consider this approach as failed, as sorry as I am for my SSD.

Or does anyone here have any idea what's going wrong and what I could do to get the thing run properly?

Depending on operating system, make sure the USB ports/controller don't go into power saving mode after N minutes.

Depending on operating system, make sure the USB ports/controller don't go into power saving mode after N minutes.

hm, I was even not aware that there is a setting for this.
The OS is Windows 10 Pro. Where do I find this setting?
I see the USB Controller in the Device Manager, but no such settings.

With the newer motherboards there are a lot of USB ports and controllers on board, so you may have to figure out which port is used by your hard drive and which controller is connected to that. Or just turn all off and turn them on one by one.

But in any case, when you check in Device Manager on the Universal Serial Bus Controllers, right click on any of the controllers may give a Power Management tab, click that and uncheck "Allow the computer to turn off the device to save power". Do this also for the Root Hubs, and with chance there's an entry for a USB Mass Storage Device with this tab entry.

Jord, it's exactly as you say - there are quite a number of different subtypes of USB3 ports. I first connected the external drive, which is USB3.0, to these ports at the rear of the case, i.e. to the motherboard directly. This did not work, though - I couldn' even get the curser moved. So I connected it to a port on fhe front of the case, called "USB3.0". The downside is, that this port is not part of the motherboard, but rather connected to it via internal cable. So my guess is that for this reason the connection simply is not stable enough for BOINC.

What I decided this morning was to install Primo RAMDisk, with which I had working already on another PC several years ago. This new PC has 64GB RAM inside, so it's perfect for RAMDisk.
An in fact, it works excellently :-)