Im looking to put togehter a new machine for trading, just curious if SSDs have been well received, generally speaking. I know they arent crucial for a trading machine's performance, but I mostly want one just because they seem cool, and they arent terribly expensive anymore. Thanks
If you design/select your software correctly, the disk drive you use shouldn't matter. Anything related to speed should be done out of RAM and battery-backed ram at the -worst-. If you are sitting around waiting for a 7ms seek time on a disk, you are already too slow. And if you aren't a performance junkie, any modern serial ATA drive will do.
I bought a solid state drive over Christmas and returned it in January. It had a claimed 90 Mbps read and write speed and would start Windows up in a few seconds. The trouble was 'random write' speeds were very low, maybe 7Mbps for small files. Windows does a lot of that. There are unusual tweaks to get round it to some degree, but I don't want unusual non-standard tweaks of that kind. It did work pretty well and probably a fresh install on a laptop or even desktop would be fine for most users, but I wanted performance under all conditions and went for the Western Digital Caviar 'Black' instead. It also has a huge capacity. This year the problem may well be solved, apparently it has a lot to do with the controller card rather than the disk itself. The handwriting is on the wall for spinning disks, at least for your main system drive. The best solution soon will be to use a 60Gb SSD for your system drive and use massive, pretty fast spinners as your secondary archive drives.
I'm not going to be interested until prices come down on SSDs which can do at least 10 MBS on small file, random writes... so far, only Intels'.. and they're expensive.
SSD are a bit overpriced at the moment. Wait for a few more months when prices go down as more competitors are entering the market. (for eg. Western Digital )