Date:         Mon, 18 Feb 2008 13:30:59 -0500
Reply-To:     George Joseph <gjman@HOTMAIL.COM>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         George Joseph <gjman@HOTMAIL.COM>
Subject:      Re: Optimal h/w for SAS on XP Pro (32-bit) ?
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

Money is NOT an issue (but it has to be well spent) but there are some very
stringent IT policies that need to be adhered to.

1) Has to be XP Pro 32-bit
2) Must only have a single HDD. So there is no question of having an array
of HDD or RAID.
3) You cannot have anything that's classified as a server.

Given these quixotic rules does it make sense to spend on a 8-core (Dual
Xeon Quad cores) or 4 Cores (Single Xeon Quad) with a 32-bit OS defined
bottleneck of 4Gb RAM and single 1Tb HDD (backup/redundancy is not important).

When I look at the Windows Task Mgr during a large sort on a Core 2 Duo I
can see both the cores being used (touching 41%) I think I have seen the
same thing on a Dual-Dual Core Xeon box too (all 4 cores are churning during
a sort) and since SORTSIZE is set to max (with BUFNO=16 and SGIO enabled) I
can see a good amount of 4GB RAM being used to.







On Mon, 18 Feb 2008 05:50:21 -0500, ben.powell@CLA.CO.UK wrote:

>I'm going out on a limb here: take what you spend on ram and cpu and double
>it for your storage array. So £150 cpu + £150 ram = £600 hdd array. Unless
>you do this I think i/o will be a noticeable bottleneck.
>
>HTH.