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Subject: Re: A second question ... Tablebases!

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 08:51:46 01/10/04

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On January 10, 2004 at 11:30:52, Lars Bremer wrote:

>Hi,
>
>>I have to buy a new OS :-((
>
>Win2k does support HT. It handles HT as two different physical processors. WinXP
>can handle these virtual processors.
>
>>The biggest wish is a good Service Pack for Windows NT4 (SP7) with USB, >Directx9
>>and Hyperthreading support! That's all :-)
>
>It exists and is called Windows XP
>
>>BTW:
>>Bob do you think that SCSI is better as S-ATA (interesting for me if I used on
>>two harddisk 5-pieces for engine-engine matches with ponder = on on dual Xeon.
>>After my first test it seems that S-ATA is just great for tablebases.
>
>Lol, SATA-drives are exactly the same as PATA-drives, there are no differences.
>I count them twice, believe me.
>Normally there is only a special chip at the drive's board to convert parallel
>to serial.
>
>If you want to know which kind of drive is better to store and use tablebases,
>you should read CSS 4/03, where I compared some different hard drives under this
>point of view.
>15k-SCSI was the best, but it was not as fast as one could think, and modern
>ATA-drives are very fast too.

SCSI drives offer far more than the IDE and IDE-followon SATA drives.

(1) 320mb/sec burst transfers, double SATA, 2.5X IDE.

(2) tagged command queueing which offloads the "optimizing" stuff from the
I/O request handler and lets the SCSI controller handle multiple requests in
the best possible order, something a request handler can hardly do since disk
drives like to "lie" about their geometry due to various compensation zones.

(3) run on a SCSI and IDE system side by side.  Do something HUGE in terms of
I/O on both.  The scsi system will feel perfectly normal.  The IDE system
will basically "freeze".

There is little to recommend IDE or SATA except _price_.  That is where its
only advantage is seen.  But I want performance.  And for endgame tables, the
faster the better.  15K drives are great, U320 15K drives are even better.  That
is what I have on my dual xeon, in fact...



>
>ciao
>
>Lars



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