So I tried to use tablebases (szygy). In Fritz 17, I simply pointed at the folders. When I started the engine to analyze a game, the hard drive where the table bases are installed went crazy. They rattle and rattle...
Is this normal? This must be killing for hard drives!
I can typically hear a little hard drive noise when it accesses my 5-piece syzygy set, but it's barely audible - nothing out of the ordinary. Do you have the tablebases installed on an internal HD?
So I tried to use tablebases (szygy). In Fritz 17, I simply pointed at the folders. When I started the engine to analyze a game, the hard drive where the table bases are installed went crazy. They rattle and rattle...
Is this normal? This must be killing for hard drives!
I can typically hear a little hard drive noise when it accesses my 5-piece syzygy set, but it's barely audible - nothing out of the ordinary. Do you have the tablebases installed on an internal HD?
Yes. It's an internal WD Black. So it's the fast version. Those are noisier anyway. But that wasn't the point. My point is that it's active full time non-stop! No way this much non-stop activity can be for a HD.
Maybe I should buy a stick or something, but it's gotta be a big one (6-men version) and I don't know if that will slow down the overall calculation speed.
I could place it my SSD, but due to its massive activity surely it will diminish the lifespan of my SSD.
I'm not a tablebase expert, but something doesn't sound right. You're not maxing out your RAM usage, are you?
I don't know how useful this information will be to you, but I found a couple of articles. The Chessbase article is probably the more useful one. The other one is way over my head.
https://en.chessbase.com/post/syzygy-tablebases-maximizing-performance
https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/issues/1789
So, after reading the Chessbase article - I don't really have a problem because I'm only using a 5-piece set. It looks like if you're going to use a 6-piece set, you'll probably need to go with either an internal SSD or a USB flash drive to hold the tablebase files. I don't know how slow the flash drive would be, or how much the 6-piece tablebase files would reduce the life of an SSD. If I were doing this with a 6-piece set, I'd probably try to install a second inexpensive internal SSD that's just large enough to hold the 6-piece tablebase files. It looks like a full 6-piece syzygy set is around 150 GB, so a 240 or 250 GB internal SSD would seem to be ideal.
Yeah, that's the problem indeed; The 160 Gb is used entirely for mapping, and therefore 16 GB ram is entirely insufficient. And placing it on my OS SSD is killing of course. To use TB's some fast external device is needed (with at least USB 3.0 connection). I was aiming for an external SSD anyway.
So I tried to use tablebases (szygy). In Fritz 17, I simply pointed at the folders. When I started the engine to analyze a game, the hard drive where the table bases are installed went crazy. They rattle and rattle...
Is this normal? This must be killing for hard drives!
"They rattle and rattle..."
Open up your computer and check there isn't two lost badgers in there.
Maybe he's using the Ferret engine...
So I tried to use tablebases (szygy). In Fritz 17, I simply pointed at the folders. When I started the engine to analyze a game, the hard drive where the table bases are installed went crazy. They rattle and rattle...
Is this normal? This must be killing for hard drives!