I am looking to purchase a New PC and have the option of 2 HardDrives but there isnt much difference in the price of each of the HardDrives.I will be using it for Daytrading with 4 TFT'S and will have Tradestation 7 running with a lot of charts open and my brokerage account and Excel.Below is the choice I have,which will be the most benefical,do I go for the higher GB and less RPM or the other way round,feedback appreciated 1)120GB (7,200 rpm) ATA/100 IDE Hard Drive with DataBurst Cache 2)36GB (10,000 rpm) U320/M SCSI Hard Drive
You may want to consider a RAID drive array.... http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/perf/raid/why.html
It really depends on your needs. Western Digital's 36.7 Serial ATA Drive at 10,000 rpm, with an 8mb buffer has some very fast data-transfer times, but it does make more noise than a 7200 and can run hotter as well due to the faster speed. For general trading needs, you most likely will not benefit from the faster transfer speeds. Better to go with a Serial ATA Drive and an 8mb buffer that runs at 7200. The drive will run cooler, and quieter as well. Thus, transfer speeds are not the only issue. Noise level and heat are too!
By the way, there is no need for a SCSI controller if you go with the Western Digital Serial ATA Raptor at 10,000 rpm. If you have on-board Serial ATA supported by your motherboard, then you are good to go! Most Intel 875 and 865 boards support Serial ATA. Thus, this would be a better drive than a SCSI because you would save some money not having to buy the controller card. www.wdc.com
The SCSI controller is probably built into the motherboard or they would not even list this hard drive as an option. Further, with todays incredibly fast CPU's, hard drive speed can make a big difference in how fast your computer feels. Although it will make no difference once your applications are loaded and running, it will make a difference on how fast they start running. Obviously, it will also make a difference when doing big IO work, like copying tons of large files around, etc. I have 15,000 RPM drives, and I really love them when im copying gigs of stock data around during my number crunching setups. I would go with the faster drive for performance. You can always add a cheap monster sized slower drive for storage later. peace axeman
if price doesnt matter go with the scsi - scsi offloads processing to the scsi controller (less CPU required). not sure if SATA has overcome this or not. speed really becomes apparent on SCSI the more file i/o you have going - not single file transfers but multiple read/writes at the same time - like a server. Id put TS writing many tick files out as a potential server application. benchmarks for file i/o scsi - http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20031119/ultra320-12.html ide - http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20040123/wd740-09.html the one IDE that excels on that graph is a RAID 0 configuration
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I would go with the 120 GB (7200 RPM) ATA/100. 1. You get a bigger drive. 2. You don't have to buy a separate controller for hard disk. 3. It's cheaper. 4. I bet you won't notice a difference if your program loads a millisecond faster. Good Luck!