Agree. Mkt orders are used most of the time, especially on exits. On entry i look to spot what i assume is coming up so will usually throw in a limit order to put the thinking into play. Most often i will get a fill. As always mkt action will determine will comes next. mkt orders are a sign of confidence and courage in your "GOLD" signals. Have a good holiday
Thanks guys for all your helpful feedback. I think I'll settle for a 10,000 rpm hard drive. No RAID 0.
My 2 cents: (1) If your setup is accessing the hard drive frequently enough to affect your trading speed then you need to find out why. A standard trading platform should not accessing the drive frequently and if even if it is it should not be the bottleneck on placing any trade. Get more RAM first. You do not need RAID 0. (2) A 10k RPM drive might be distracting or annoying. Make sure you don't get one that is intolerable noisy or you may regret it. (3) There is 3rd party software you can install to display a little light in the system tray when the hard disk is being accessed - if you can't easily see the hdd led on the PC itself this is an easy alternative. Windows performance monitor (built into the OS) can be used to monitor disk I/O (as well as a host of other performance attributes). That is a great way to generate historical graphs of hard drive usage.
I have 2 10k raptors in the new box setup in RAID-0............i have NEVER been disturbed from hard drive noise during the day.....NEVER. Did i mention that i do NOT like noise from a puter? SCSI drives have noise. If it was not for SCSI noise i would have went with 2 15k scsi drives .. I have an older IBM intellistation workstation and it has a SCSI 18g scsi and when i fire it up to shake the cobwebs out. The first thing i notice is how mush noise the scsi makes.......the 2 raptors are not even noticed. FWIW PS, the other puter has a 10k raptoer also, no noise thank you.
Raid 0 is a damn good thing for strategy backtesting and optimization, which read tons of large files very often. But then, SSD is even better.
as far as losing a drive in RAID-0, no real biggie. If a drive goes out you just switch to a backup puter and continue trading until the mkt closes and then switch out a drive, etc. Remember your Boy Scout motto: Be prepared and go for the hottest babe at camp or a sock hop.
Thanks to GTS' suggestion, I found DiskMon which works rather well. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896646.aspx It's part of the Sysinternals Suite which GTS also referred to in one of his previous posts. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/0e18b180-9b7a-4c49-8120-c47c5a693683.aspx