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.
