Due to covid i decided do dedicate a raspberry pi to boinc. Now i'm running it on a Raspberry Pi4 with raspbian in it. I'd like to know how to change the working directory to an external hdd rso it doesn't use my systsem SD.
Sorry i'm new to this.

Due to covid i decided do dedicate a raspberry pi to boinc. Now i'm running it on a Raspberry Pi4 with raspbian in it. I'd like to know how to change the working directory to an external hdd rso it doesn't use my systsem SD.
Sorry i'm new to this.

As far as I know, Boinc projects only install on the OS directory, unless you do an advanced install and are able to move certain partitions to another drive upon installation of Debian (which I don't know how to do).

On the RPI 3B+ there was an SD card 'hack' (if I can call it like that), that forwarded the boot to USB drives.
I have on occasion been able to boot straight from USB.
If you could install the entire OS on an external SSD over USB, you may experience improved speeds overall compared to the slow SD card.

Corsair Voyager GTX is basically an SSD in USB flash drive format.

Not done this but the way I would do it is do an advanced install with whichever distro you use and make /var/lib/boinc-client/ a partition on an the external hard disk. I know this works on a desktop to put the data files for BOINC onto a different physical hard disk. I haven't played with a Pi so I don't know exactly what is involved but pretty sure there will be stuff on the Pi forums to help with it.

I have redirected the entire root drive to external HDD in the past. I will see if i can find the blog post I did that explains how. Currently I have 2 x Pi4 running Rosetta off their SD cards.

It’s not as bad as it used to be when they unzipped a database of approx 1GB into the slot every time a task started. These days with the 4.20 app the database is in the project folder and remains there so a lot less writes. You can also increase the checkpoint interval time to reduce the writes. I have all of mine set to 600 sec.

Another option would be to symlink the /var/lib/boinc-client folder to some directory on your external drive.

Edit
Found the blog post from 2016. It’s here

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MarkJ

I thought I read a while back that the OS on external drives, on the Pi4B isn't supported, but it is on the 3B/3B+.
It might have changed over time.