Hi everyone, I have a new computer on the way and I am hoping for some insight on installing SAS to it. The main purpose of the computer is for ETL and Enterprise Miner / Text Miner work. Other software that will be installed includes: SAS Base of course Enterprise Guide SAS/ESRI Bridge MS Visual Studio MySQL ArcGIS As you can see from the list of software, the computer will have a variety of use cases, but the most important one right now is ETL and Data/Text Mining. The Computer specs are: Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit Dual Processors: Two Intel Xeon E5-2680 2.70 20MB 1600 8C NVIDIA Quadro K4000 3GB DL-DVI(I)+DP+DP 1st 128GB DDR3-1600 (8x8GB+8x8GB) 2CPU Registered RAM 512GB SATA 1st Solid State Drive 600GB 15k RPM SAS 2nd Hard Drive 1TB 10K RPM SATA 3rd Hard Drive The computer has 3 disks. I’m planning on doing the following: SSD - OS and software 600GB 15k – Scratch space (….is this where SASWORK goes?) 1TB 10K – General storage / backup I have 7 questions: Any recommendations or tips for how and where to install the SAS software given these 3 disks to choose from? Are there any 64bit SAS software tweaks I should be aware of? Would it be better to get another SSD in place of the 600GB SATA? (My concern is SSD Lifespan. The SSD’s are consumer entry ones (i.e. multi-layer cell drives?). If this is my “scratch disk” for temporary stuff, wouldn’t it decrease the lifespan of the SSD?) Perhaps I have enough RAM that one doesn’t need a dedicated scratch disk? The largest data sets I work with are maybe 100,000 observations (some of them can have up to 200 variables). However, when I do Text Mining, it often results in much larger temporary data sets. Thoughts? I’ve read that “SAS usually does large, blocked I/O, especially when doing analytical tasks” and I’ve also read that ETL processes require good I/O throughput. These are my primary uses of the computer (Data and Text Mining and ETL). How does this affect how I use these 3 disks? I've also read I need to turn on "Read-Ahead and Write-Behinds/Write-Through and enable dynamic multi-pathing to spread I/O over multiple fiber channels" but I have no idea how one does this on a Windows machine (I am used to activating TRIM for SSD and tweaking my drives on my personal Linux computer at home). Can anyone shed insight on this? Lastly, can I take advantage of the new text mining and data mining HPA procs? Or are these new HPA procs only usable in particular ‘server’ products as opposed to the desktop products for which I am using? Thank you.
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