hello forum,

i discover the "Volunteer Storage" page on the wiki a few weeks ago and i have question. I really want to use this to suppport certain projects(because i have about 2-4TB of free space!) . Are there any project who use this feature at the moment?

thx

As of now, the feature is only partly implemented.
No projects are using it.
It will be several months before it's available to projects.
-- David

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Okay, can't wait

Any new news on this project?

No news, just some critical thinking and some questions...

Where are they going to find a project admin desperate enough to store his data on disks that come and go like gypsys in the night? It's an interesting concept but it isn't going to happen. You can count on a disk owned by a commercial enterprise or university (just 2 examples, there are probably more) being reliably available because they are owned and administered by professionals/experts. But a disk owned by Mario Potoshnyak, a migrant brick layer building dikes in the Netherlands running on Winblows and a power supply so plugged up with dust it's ready to burst into flames at any moment? No surge protection? Full of kiddie porn and likely to be confiscated by the cops any day? Behind Swiss cheese firewall and so full of viruses they fight to see which one will wipe the disk? OK, so you imitate a RAID and stripe your data across 100 unreliable disks, 50% of which can't be accessed at any given time because Norton won't allow it because the admin's on crak and reverted to a restore point set before you contacted him to explain what AV software is and how to tell Norton to allow your server to access his disk. So you email him but he doesn't remember who you are or you find he's changed his mind because your data slows down his shoot 'em up game so he's deleted your data. The other 50% are down due to <pick a reason from the 100 entry list and insert it here> and now where is your data? The overhead you'll spend resyncing data over a Dave A. goofy RAID will require a server of its own and an additional $100 worth of bandwidth from your ISP every month. Why not just buy another server of your own, a few 3 TB drives and save your bandwidth? Or rent some cloud storage from a reliable enterprise like Amazon, Google, etc. Look around and see how little storage costs these days, it really is amazing.

If you have a burning need to provide your favorite project with disk space then setup a reliable RAID 10 and let him mount it as NAS or throw in an Apache daemon and let him access it on http or ftp. I did it for a project and they love it. I give them 4 X 3 TB disks plus a hot spare in RAID 10 plus a virgin 3 TB disk in it's original package sitting on the shelf ready to be pluged in if one of the 4 primary disks fail and the hot spare kicks in. It runs on Linux's free mdisk RAID software. I went to a local business and twisted their arm until they donated a disk. Then I went to their competitor and told them their competitor was beating them. The I went to a third business and told them what their 2 competitors are doing and suddenly I had a third new 3TB disk in my bag. The other 3 disks came via the same "you're falling behind arm twisting strategy". Now my ISP is expressing some interest in giving me free unlimited bandwidth every month! Another store gave me a 275 GB hybrid disk to put the boot, main binaries and swap partitions on. The thing boots in 4 seconds with an X session. I got 16 GB RAM donated to the cause, all brand new stuff. I talked to the guy who runs the battery shop and he told me why every UPS I see on the store shelf is junk and he gave me 3 huge brand new AGM lead-acid, deep cycle batteries, a really cool 40 amp battery charger, a 1,000 watt power inverter and showed me how to assemble it all into one exquisite backup/spike-protection/line-noise-filter any sysadmin would kill to own. It powers the 3 machines I own for at least 4 hours if the mains go down. Cost me a coffee, a donut, a smile and some brown-nosing. I built it all into a small cabinet that sucks winter air in from the outside, filters it through a HEPA filter and discharges the hot air to the outdoors. It's 10 Celsius inside the cabinet right now and there is a GTX 570 GPU in there running full blast. Cost me $30 to build, no BS. In the summer I'll patch in a small AC unit for July and August. Something like that a struggling new project can use and you can build one too. 100 mickey mouse 167 GB gypsy partitions held together by string in a Dave A. RAID will be nothing but a PITA for a project admin. A few very desperate ones might try it but not for long. Experienced admins will shy away. They can see how well CreditNew and the scheduler work so tagging the disk share scheme as another one of Dave's broken pipedreams will come easy. Not that BOINC isn't an amazing system but some of its components suck bigtime, sorry Dave, spades are spades here.

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"Windows" -- an American English word, meaning "A real operating system is too hard for me."