I would look into a RAID setup if your mother board supports it. But we are talkin about trading here, not a database server. As a trader, my main concern would be to hav a computer that gives you the least amount of headache. Go with the 120 Gb. No problems with noise, no problems with heat (lifespan shorter possiblity), and you just have more space for all that pron that you download when your positions are idle.
Many client-server trading applications like Tradestation 7 access their data primarily from RAM. So having a super fast hard drive system often yields little performance benefit. However, if your trading software retrieves a lot of data from disk, like the standalone "thick" version of First Alert for example, then hard drive throughput can really come into play. If you want to learn more about the benefits and performance of RAID you may find this article helpful: http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/concepts/perf-c.html
Hi, this has not been mentioned yet, but if one really care for speed for its trading platform and if the hard drive speed is the key bottleneck of your system, then the best way is really to run your full trading applications from a virtual RAM drive : you will outperformed in speed any existing SATA, SCSI drives or RAID cofigurations... As Robert mentioned, most of data are already stored in RAM, but it is even best to fully remove the hard disk from the chain and run all programs on RAM⦠This is especially true when you update some charts/compute some indicators with each incoming new tick data and trade symbols with many ticks (like ES, NQ..) So, my first recommendation would be to buy high quality RAM modules and then run your application on virtual RAM disk using one of these programs : http://www.superspeed.com/ramdiskplus.html http://www.cenatek.com/product_ramdisk.cfm I have myself 3 RAM modules installed (512 Mo each), with ca 500 Mo allocated for Esignal and Investor RT. I am running live some very intensive computation programs as I keep updating signals produced by complex trading systems based on constant tick bars. The difference versus running these programs on hard drives was just amazing, because, in my case, the hard drive speed was indeed the bottleneck⦠Both software have automatic backup of data at the end of each session, so you donât have any installation operation to perform when starting a new windows session : your trading programs are just there, on you local RAM drive, ready to run.. Eddy
Alternatively, if your application is hard disk reliant, requires more RAM than you have available, and/or is mission critical you can pick up one of these: http://www.platypus.net/products/direct_attach.asp EGM uses a QikDrive for a high-end disk-intensive trading application because it's read-write performance is 100+ times faster than a conventional drive. Mind you, it's overkill for most trading applications. It's also, shall we say, a tad pricey.
gnome, We do not have time to discuss those here in this forum......This is the hardware forum. Waggie is right.... Michael B.