listen, the UNIX world is "my world" ... I've been around Solaris since the days it was BSD on SunOS 4.1.x... and Linux, since the days of BBS's mostly, when I had to compile my own distribution(Slackware based) to run on a 386... and if we are going to quote gear.. I think I have easily outspent anyone on this board... and that is because my lab reflects the systems I support and design for... and it is a write off of course.. anyhow, moving on... you shouldnt generalize IT people... my specialty is front and back office systems for financial services infrastructure... my designs are built based on requirements, never overspec... anyhow, dont go by you are told all the times... educate yourself instead of going by what someone told you, specially when you are being corrected by multiple people on an erroneous statment, you seem to be pretty smart based on the threads I looked and your work with options... I dont doubt you can grasp the concept of systems architecture rather easily.. lastly, the level of protection should be determined by people based on what they value their data at... and what their time is worth... not to mention, their downtime... a mirrored data drive set (even SSD) will set you back $500-600 (with a good controller)... my time is easily worth more than that, and so is my data... let's not forget, trading is a business... treat it as such..
Yeah, I am convinced. R1 is best-practice for this implementation at the very least in terms of convenience and less frequent B/U. I have no local data that I am concerned about losing and don't run a RAID on my main system (12-core MacPro).
infrastructure... my designs are built based on requirements, never overspec... I think this is key - and I am of the same opinion I'm puzzled by someo f the posts on this board laying out specs for $3000 machines where its not clear what applications would require that kind of hardware investment
"I have unix gear which is 15 years old and has run continuously in that time and never had a drive failure. " I ran a 10 Terabyte Solaris shop for a financial services company for many years - Raised floor, clean power, chilled air. A system running even 2 years without a single drive failure was unheard of. We lost drives all the time.
For backup I just pull the drive out of the rig and duplicate them using this cheap Startech duplicator every week or so. Drives are very cheap items. I have never had a drive suddenly crash or go out on me in any event. I have a few drives here which are ancient but still work. Its good to have backup especially as a PC user where your system is in a constant state of fubar. Mac users dont have the same issues.
it isn't, I don't think the cost is the issue as much as to what it will be used for... I can easily spend $800-$1000 for a super great trading system... or anywhere from $3K-$5K for an amazing trading system... they will both do the same job if the requirement is day trading, but I would have wasted $2K+ with the super amazing one... requirements should drive what is procured, which will determine the expense... if your applications dont consume even 8GB of RAM, why waste $$$ getting 16GB or even 32GB?... if you will never do 3D in that workstation, why get a Video Card that will excel at 3D rendering? I could have a $1MM account, and I would still think the same way... just because you have the money doesnt mean you should spend it on unnecessary things.. at least that is how I think.
careful, you run the risk of damaging it unless you have it on a carrier and just transfer those around... IMO, I would recommend you look at acronis with their plus pack and just take BMR images of that, save to external and then you can restore at any time... you can do this daily.. the images will compress and the baremetal restore will take about 30 mins..