No, unless used on servers for disk intensive application. I'd like to recommend the fastest ATA drive: http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/02q1/020305/index.html
I am myself looking to get a new machine. Pardon me for taking the opportunity to ask a question on this thread. You will see that I don't seem to be in the same league as the previous posters here. I figured I really don't need a high performance and expensive system . Just 256 or 512 Mb of RAM, a graphic card supporting dual monitor. Now for the processor I think a Celeron at 1.5Ghz will do. I traded for months on a Celeron 500 and I am now on P4 and don't see any difference(actually the P4 has some problems when I run LiveCharts BTW) Here is my question: all the Celeron have 128 Kb cache while the P4 have 512Kb. Does it make a difference for trading on 2 monitors, running charting soft , execution platform plus a couple browser windows? Also is it worth putting a $150 Matrox card in my Celeron 500 MHz with only 128 Mb to have 2 monitors on my second PC?
Many so called SCSI drives are really ATA drives with a SCSI interface and have the same performance as do ATA drives. A person running a web server is going to want to get an Atlas 10,000 rpm drive which is a true SCSI drive. It's expensive, very fast and, I'm told, somewhat loud and not really necessary for most end user type computers. Todays 7,200 rpm ATA drives are very fast. Most applications are not disk drive intensive so getting the a SCSI drive is not going to help.
There is a lot of passion in the ranks of hard core hardware types concerning AMD vs. Intel. Not sure on the latest rankings, but when I built my PC a couple months ago, nothing was faster than an Intel with PC1066 RDRAM. Nothing. You'll definately want to RAID your drives. Check their speeds, interface and buffers. I think Maxtor is the only manufacturer making the ATA133 drives (if you are going IDE). If you do want that ATA133 make sure your mainboard supports it. Some mainboards have onboard RAID, but I think that onboard RAID is a little slower than a seperate controller. Not sure though. And, I suggest that you consider a high end case like Lian-Li. Once you've built a rig with a good case, you won't want to use a Chieftec or any of those other low end models. Get plenty of memory (I bought a gig). Your trading PCs are the way you make money - spending a couple hundred dollars to get a slight edge is a great thing to do.
The 1.5 GHZ Celeron is actually very similar in power to the P4 except for the smaller cache which wont matter unless you are a gamer or processing graphics files or maybe hosting a big java application. Should be plenty of power for the trading app. Sites like www.tomshardware.com and www.vanshardware.com have many comparisons of the various CPUs.
Just a few of comments: The Vantec Sleath fans are not THAT quiet. Yes they are quieter than standard fans but there are quieter fans out there. For example the Panaflo 1LA is a VERY quiet fan. Also consider a fan with a speed control if you are worried about noise. CPU cooler. Get a heatsink with a 80mm fan vs a 60mm fan. It is much quieter and more flexible. Certain companies specialize in quiet heatsinks. Zalman makes heatsinks for quietness. I am about to order an Artic Cooling Inc. Super Silent PRO to test the quietness on that. Power supply fans tend to make considerable amount of noise too. Consider a Power supply with a MANUAL control for the fan speed. I have to agree with the comments on hard drive noise. Although not loud it's a boring, high frequency noise that can drown out all other noise in the system in terms of annoyance.
No. And with IDE/ATA being very dominant, many SCSI drives are really IDE drives wtih SCSI firmware sitting over the native IDE interface. So the benefits that were obvious say 10 years ago are practially gone (for consumer class products)
I would disagree. Why would you want to go with RAID on a computer used for trading? Why buy one, when you can buy two for twice the price? Seems like a waste of money to me. Just buy one good 7200 RPM drive.
Just to add my two cents. The benefits of SCSI are not primarily related to the drives themselves. Although because of where they are usually used, the high performance SCSI drives are pretty darn fast. The real benefit of SCSI is in the interface itself. First, a single SCSI interface can support many more drives than a single IDE interface. So if you need to hook up five hard drives to your computer, SCSI is probably the way to go. An IDE interface supports two drives per controller. Note that most motherboards these days contain two IDE controllers for a max of four drives (hard, CD, DVD, etc.) without the use of an extra controller card. Second, the SCSI interface allows all devices attached to it to communicate simultaneously. So if you have five drives, three could be in the process of storing files at the same time the other two are streaming audio/video, etc. A SCSI interface is a multitasking interface. Whereas an IDE interface only allows one device to have control at a time. Not that anyone would notice given the speed of these things these days. Anyway, this is why most people put their IDE CD-ROM drives on the secondary IDE controller and not on the same controller as their hard drives (since the CD-ROM drives are significantly slower access devices). Anyway, the advantages of SCSI are pretty much stuck in the server and audio/video production domains. For a personal computer, IDE/ATA is the way to go.