Good choice. I don't think that the softwares you have addressed will really show any major pickups in abilities/speeds for your uses though. But it will be a nice machine I'm sure. Good luck and happy trading!
Diskkeeper comes to mind, but there are a number of other products, as well as those products that are now wrapped in under Win2000 Server as features.
The 800Mhz FSB's (front side bus) along with QPB support will show a radical speed improvement across the board on all applications being run, both on laptops (when the equivalent chipsets are released) and on desktops. Under that basis, the background tasks of parallel data support (as described through multiple means earlier) will have a far smaller overall impact upon your processing speed and speed of your applications. You mentioned a healthy combination of applications, inclusive of TOS Option's package. Who do you use for Direct Access and are you a Prop or Retail (IUDM - if you don't mind)?
Dont run an OS based software RAID. If you cant boot up into the system, then you are locked out of your disk. Run the Promise RAID controller and 2 hard disks for mirroring. Its very simple and the OS overhead is no big deal for anything resembling current cpus. If you absoluletly want NO additional CPU load, run the 3Ware controller which has its own on board processor. Mirror RAIDs are easy and IMO should be standard for business for developer workstations.
Backup/recovery software usually comes with a CDRW/DVDR-RW drive for that, e.g., the HP CDRWs ship with an HP utility that will image your hard drives to CDs and create 4 bootable floppies. If there's a disaster, you can boot from the floppies and restore the complete disk config from the CDs.
I'm just a regular person slowly getting more into trading and hoping to make a living at it eventually. As for direct access, I've got three accounts. Interactive Brokers' Trader Workstation, TradeStation's TS6 (not really direct access for futures), thinkorswim's frontend (for options). Sorry, I'm still a little new to all this, what does IUDM mean?
Bobby, Its rare that this many persons with in depth technical experience, as exhibited here in, will have the inclination or the time to contribute to these threads, let alone take the time to clearly explain their thoughts. Normally amongst us Tech's we speak in acronym soup and quite fast at that. Ever see "Alias"?, Marshall is an excellent example of that. This time, we got over four diffent clarifications and explanations of Raid, Usage of Raid, Practical implementations of such, Recommendations of pseudo-Raid configurations, normal-Raid configurations and alternate-Raid configurations (software based). Now if we could only explain how to place a trade, then.....