gnome is correct, almost no one needs it, and it does greatly increase your chance of complete loss of data. That said, I run Raid 0 w/15k SAS drives on my colocated boxes, I'm running my trading app and databasing full tick on L1 & L2 data (all books), as well as heavy application logging. This is several GB of data a day. Raid 0 has definately been a big help in keeping this running smoothly. I've done this on non raid 0 drives, and got a high frequency of 'delayed drive write' errors, where the disk couldn't keep up.
If you're building it yourself, the difference between raid0 and non raid is what, $400? Guys, <I>this is our business</I>! Why would we want to not have the fastest primary tool? Prior to me having raid using just a plain old Dell box, more than once, in the background, the drive was swapping out data when I clicked a trade. It took probably 5 seconds to actual execute the order and by that point, the trade had run away from me (I'm a scalper). No more. Quad processor, 4 gigs of ram, and dual 10K drives. It's never happened since. I click the button - the trade is placed. And it cost me maybe $1200 to build the box.
steve0617 writes: "Prior to me having raid using just a plain old Dell box, more than once, in the background, the drive was swapping out data when I clicked a trade." "No more. Quad processor, 4 gigs of ram, and dual 10K drives." All you needed was the 4g RAM. All the rest is window dressing. Particularly the quad core, utterly useless for a trader. Martin
I don't think I'd want anything in my computer spinning at a constant 10,000 rpm all day, every day, all year. I'd be really surprised to hear reports of longevity and error-free operation at those speeds for several years. I wouldn't buy one.
I don't have raid, but using Ninjatrader I wish I had it. NT uses the disk drive everytime I place a trade, and sometimes it costs me. My next box will be high end dual core with raid 0 +1, with 7200 rpm drives. I had a box from Dell once that I sent back with a 10K WD drive that made way too much noise for me. I read that raid 0 with 7200 drives is like a single drive at 14K, good enough
He's right though. There must be some placebo effect because eveyone at ET keeps doing it ("I have a $2k machine so I must be a good trader.") RAID 0 is idiotic on your primary machine for reasons everyone already pointed out. The 5 second lag was almost certainly because he had his power settings set to idle the hard drive after X minutes. Reset that parameter and the 5 second wait to get the drive spindle up to speed goes away. Quad core probably isn't necessary, but it's a fairly cheap upgrade. (I have 4 of them and two are even in machines with RAID-0 setup, but they are easily replaceable backtesting drones.) btw, the machine that actually makes my money is a 4 year old 2.4 Ghz Pentium 4, but it has all day to churn through a day's worth of data unlike my backtesters who get about 10 minutes/core. If your data is coming in on an internet connection and a human is doing the trading you really don't need more than a well configured computer that's less than 5 years old.
it does somewhat...but in reality, not worth the trouble for your average desktop usage. For your normal trading, it definitly doesnt do much other than double your hdd failure rate. If you need better hdd performance to run heavy data processing / backtesting models, then look into server side technology. Just get a 150GB raptor 10k, or look into the new solid state drivers SSD if you got money to burn.