Question about Critter 1.6 & Gaviota gtb's

[Mike S.]

I don't know if it's fairly up-to-date, but the following web page has listed the access times of various memory devices (see 2nd list at the bottom):

http://www.jens-hartmann.at/Fritzmarks/

There's also a link to a tool which measures access times.

P.S. I was using a Corsair Voyager "intensively" for Nalimovs. Mostly read accesses, only very few writes for backups, once in a while. After some month it was broken. I got free replacement but since then, I don't use it like that anymore.

[pohl4711]

Experiment (CSS, 2006 (german magazine for computer chess))

Access time:

HDD (MHU2100AT): 20,35ms
2GB USB-stick: 2,43 ms
4GB USB-stick: 1,00 ms

-> TB acces 20x faster on an 4 GB USB-stick (today the flash memory is better)

[syzygy]

I would be surprised if HDD seek time beats USB2 access time. For tablebase access, seek time is what counts.

USB access is 20-100x faster than HDD-access. Because of that, all TBs are very, very slow on HDDs!

Yes, that's what I thought.

Of course a real SSD would perform better than a USB stick.

Not sure about that. A SSD is flash-memory, too.

Yes, they are both flash memory. What I meant is that a SATA (or PCIe) interface probably has lower latency than a USB2 interface.

[Norm Pollock]

I've been using a 16G flash drive that has 2 folders - \nalimov and \gtb. Each folder takes up a little less than 8G.

[Mike S.]

In the benchmark list I have linked to above, the best flash memory has an access time of 0.38 ms (0.32...0.84) and the best SSD has 0.06 (0.04...0.30).