Anybody use SCSI? Newegg has them at 15000 rpm. Is there an advantage of SCSI over IDE? Are they that much faster? Thanks, Harold
Consider that SATA is the new desktop standard, not IDE - I wouldnt even consider buying IDE drives these days. SCSI still offers performance advantages, as you point out, the fastest drives still come out in SCSI first however the latest SATA specs has plenty of bandwidth - the performance gap between SCSI and non-SCSI drives is closing with the migration from IDE to SATA. SCSI still has a place in the server world but I would be hard pressed to recommend it to anyone for a desktop/workstation solution. If you really need high performance disk IO, do a raid array with SATA drives and a hardware controller (e.g. 3WARE), its much cheaper then an equivalent SCSI setup.
SCSI is much more costly.... and noisy, due to high spindle speed. You'll need a mobo which accommodates or an add-on PCI controller. In addition, you'll probably benefit little from the speed unless your apps have intense I/O operations. (Most trading apps run from memory once loaded.) Current actual performance on IDE is approx 30 mb/s. On SATA, 35-38 mb/s.... negligible difference, though much is promised in the future for SATA. Bottom line... you mobo is probably designed for either IDE or SATA. Just go with that. (Some mobos have ports for both IDE and SATA. Mine has both. I've chosen to use IDE.)
If your OS and your video's are on the same physical drive, AND you spend a lot of time editing videos, they you may notice improved performance during the editing process with 10K drives; You'll also get better performance by moving your videos off the OS drive, reducing contention for disk I/O's - But again, for the average user, I don't think trimming off a few seconds from boot or a few seconds off the editing process is worth the extra money, and limited storage capacities... The value (in my humble opinion) is in the reliability of the drives; 10K and higher are designed and manufactured to a more stringent set of tolerances and standards. Often designed for MTBF (mean time between failure) measured in hundreds of thousands of hours, they will generally out live us, let alone your computer; and generally offer more sophisticated error avoidance and recovery features build into the logic of the drive...
You don't need a 10k rpm HDD to trade with. You need RAM. The more the better. After your HDD loads the trading software, its job is done. Now for trading you need processing speed and RAM.