Depends. UPS costs money, takes up space. One has to weigh that against what would be lost in a power interruption and how valuable the loss. I've never used UPS likely never will. If I lose power, most I could lose is 1 hr of market data. The "write to storage" takes about 1 second for each time interval and about 4 seconds for EOD. Hardly "horrendous".
Depends - loss of power can result in corruption of OS requiring restore from backup. Also depends on trading interval - some may look at 1 minute chart while others look at 4 hour charts. Writing to SSD - windows continuously writes to storage and some trading software writes every tick to storage. For something like the mini S&P that can be a lot of writes leading to overflow of the que which in case of some SSD can lead to corruption or temporary locking up of the SSD until the backlog is cleared. Been there and done that.
That's a key point. SSD's are faster than most HDD rotational drives for typical writes, but slower than the higher-end HDD's for mass writes.
For licensing? I believe so but it depends on the OS. With Microsoft you aren't allowed per the license to install their OS'es on removable drives. There are hardware flags (coded into the firmware and hardware identifiers) that tell the OS if it's a "removable drive" or a non-removable drive. It's literally changing between a 1 & a 0 but you somewhat need to hack in to get there. I Googled "make usb drive non removable" Somewhere in there it should get you pointed in the right direction if you really feel so inclined... https://www.google.com/search?q=mak...l5.4655j0j7&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8 We run ESXi 5.1 (VMware) on 2.0GB (1.83GB usable) Kingston and Sandisk brand MicroSD cards. I run various other *nix flavors (CentOS and Mint) for some web servers, etc. on 16GB & 32GB USB & CF cards. On the 24/7/365 server machines it's good because the OS'es are fairly static, no disk defrags, no updates, etc. and it frees up an extra SATA power and data port. On the VMware ESXi machines we shove as many SSD's in there as we can for everything from VM/guest cache to actual boot drives, to deployment vehicles, etc. On the web servers it's great because we can take a tiny little pizza box, boot Linux or BSD off the USB, and have a full 3.5" HDD bay that's OS independent reserved for data only. (similar to putting your Windows OS on a small dedicated SSD) When we switched over to Hyper-V from ESXi I was warned that not only are these types of media flagged as removable and therefore need to be changed (and you probably still are in violation of the license)... they also don't have wear leveling which means they will write to the same blocks over and over which will kill the drives faster and put you at risk for OS reliability. For reference I had ESXi (VMware) running from 4.0 through 5.1 over the course of about 3 years on the same 2GB Micro SD card... however I burned through a fairly high quality 16gb thumb drive trying to run Hyper-V in about 9 months. If you really feel inclined to carry around your OS with you I'd do it via external sata (eSATA) and dump it on a laptop sized spinny drive or SSD. With the issues we had on Hyper-V I'd say that the Windows OS & kernel isn't really happy about USB 2.0/3.0 throughput speeds as your hosted OS drive. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++ I was actually coming in here to post about something different. We use a bunch of cheap/retail 32, 60/64 and 120/128gb SSD's for VMs and virtualization. They are used to host VM operating systems, for VM cache, RAID array cache, and host cache. I've been upgrading the firmware on my SSD's the last day or so and I have to say the difference is night and day. Some of the drives the benchmarks are almost double. That said... I've bricked a few as well so whatever you do be careful or you'll have a dead drive on your hands. Don't attempt unless it's something you can go without for the RMA period.
Shouldn't players who are serious about trading/hardware have backups to cope with virtually any happenstance (including spare drives, of course.)?
Is that a below the belt jab I'm in the process of installing XP32 (dual-boot) onto my desktop so that I can try to save/recover the SSD I bricked at about 3am this morning. Yes always have backups of everything. If I had a backup on hand I would have upgraded the backup first - and either have bricked that and stopped, or completed it and been able to do a quick swap/change. Instead I figured "what could possibly go wrong??"
I didn't mean you specifically. The comment was for others reading this thread. I know you have layers of backup all around. Even basic traders should have a couple of spare drives on hand, system clones/images, RAM, PSU... at a minimum.
Speaking of backups, how do you guys feel about the security of a service like BackBlaze? In addition to trading IP, are you comfortable having personal id/financial info automatically backed up there?
Update... All of the drives made it to 700TB of writes. Some are still going @ >1PB. http://techreport.com/review/26523/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-casualties-on-the-way-to-a-petabyte
What I do instead is encrypt (with gnu pgp) client side and backup those ' buckets' to the hoster. I'm using Google Drive and linux tool duplicity. Make sure you have that private key stored somewhere else than on your pc. If the private key is lost, the backup can not be decrypted.