How big of a disk drive do I need

This is another component that is nearly always overlooked but is extremely important to the performance and reliability of a trading computer. Most traders believe that they should get the highest capacity drive they can because they will be getting more for their money. The fact is that most traders don’t use more than 50GB of drive capacity, so what would be the point in getting a system with a 1TB hard drive. Similar to the memory/RAM is the quality over quantity approach. It isn’t how much capacity that is important, but the speed. When you access a file or write data to the drive, each drive has specific timings, in other words how fast it will do the task. Trading applications are constantly writing to the RAM and to the drive, so it is important to keep up with the demand. I recommend Solid State Drives over Hard Disks as they are both faster and more reliable. You want to definitely stay with the latest interface technology called SATA III (serial ATA). I would not recommend looking into a SAS route, as the benefit to traders isn’t enough to justify the overwhelming cost. So again, you should think quality, not quantity. If you do indeed need storage space, you can always have an external large capacity hard drive or large capacity “secondary” internal hard drive for backing up and storing files that don’t get used often.