Regarding the SSDs. 1. You really should do the tweaks. XP was built for the hardware available at that time. Correct alignment of the partition can make a big difference as it prevents XP writing to two blocks every time it wants to write small blocks. 2. Small block writes are doubly bad if you don't have correctly aligned partitions. In my situation there are few small writes (cache, temp, pagefile on ramdisks) but those who care about smallwrite performance on SSDs seem to use MFT to resolve that problem. The way I've set it up you get the promised performance particularly the benefits of fast random access reads. The biggest benefit of the SSD for me is that I run a near silent machine and the SSD lets the harddrive spin down and stay silent most of the trading day - green too without hd power use. All that with an exceptionally fast setup. Its horses for courses though and I wouldn't want to be without my hard disk either. With what I've learn't setting up and optimizing the ssd I would now run a hard disk based system differently and could make it almost as quiet and green ... but not quite as fast, the random read performance is pretty cool. >>>>>>>>>>> Note: My data/program partition uses MFT. Here are comparisons (KBps or MBps) between the MFT partition and my Seagate 500G 7200. Block size MFTSSD HD7200 512B 2.1MB 310KB 1KB 4.5MB 602KB 4KB 65.4MB 2.3MB So running MFT you outperform the hard disk by an order of magnitude. By comparison for small block writes like this the HD was faster than a raw SSD without MFT.
Or imagine how "Fat Finger" errors will actually be attributed to people who have fat fingers and touch the wrong trade.