Hi Kurt,
I am only suggesting that I/O is one of the additional areas to look at. I would recommend watching the process whilst it is running and getting an idea of CPU, memory and I/O utilization for the process.
I assume your
😧 drive is on the RAID0 array? Do you know how many disks you have in the array, what type of disks they are and what type of controller they sit on? Do you know where your SAS WORK library is configured to go? Is it also targetting the same RAID0 array or a different storage device?
What sort of results are you getting? Do you have a SAS log fragment you would want to post that includes the code that was run, and elapsed times obtained? Can you tell us how many gigabytes your SAS datasets are in the file system and how much elapsed time it takes to create them from something like a proc copy? This should give us a very rough idea of average I/O throughput for the process.
Is there any other concurrent processing occurring on your machine that might be competing for resources with your SAS program? When you run your benchmark tests are you confident that there is nothing else running on the machine?
BTW out of interest I assume that with that much RAM you are also using 64-bit SAS on 64-bit Windows? I also assume your SAS processing occurs on the physical machine and not in a virtual machine?
Regarding I/O optimization and design choices, I often refer people to some excellent SAS Institute papers on this subject. I have listed some of the key ones on my blog at
http://platformadmin.com/blogs/paul/2010/09/sas-io-config-resources/
Cheers
Paul