I don't know a whole lot about this type of thing so I thought I should ask before going to pick up the gear on the weekend. What's currently the best setup for performance and protection right now? RAID 0+1? The Raptors seem tempting but I'm not sure if they justify the costs. Seems like having 2 or 4 7200s could be better. Four 250-500 gb drives are quite cheap these days. I want it to be very reliable because I have a lot of data I want to perserve (pictures, videos, trading stuff) but I also want top speed because of backtesting/automation. Backtester currently reads in about 1-1.5 gigs of data from file per minute (not sure how much of it is the processing of the data, and how much is the actual reading). Anything I can do to shorten that time hardware-wise would be a bonus. Not sure if the real time automation will benefit from a faster drive though. My drive now is an older IDE WD so I figure its defintely time to upgrade (since I recently upgraded to a Q6600). Maybe 2 drives dedicated to OS and frequently read files in RAID 0, and 2 drives for data storage in RAID 1, and daily backups of OS HDs onto the 2 data storage drives? Or 1 Raptor and 2 data storage drives? Advantages for storing the OS on a seperate drive/partition? Do the program files go on that drive too? Thanks in advance.
I use the latest Raptor 150GB for main O/S drive and a 160GB 7.2k Cavier SATA ($55) for storage. If you want to save some $, recommend the 36GB Raptor ($90 vs $160). Use the 36 in my backup system. The Raptor is great for churning through loads of downloaded historical data/backtesting. O/S functionality noticeably snappier. Won't use anything else. Fast enough that RAID would simply be overkill. All critical data (pictures, documents etc) is stored on DVD and placed in a fire-proof safe bolted to our closet floor. IMO one should not trust irreplaceable pics/digital documents on any HD array long term since they are all bound to failure at some point in time.