Hard Drives and Backups
For a trading computer you should always use a Solid State Hard Drive (SSD). SSD's are much faster and more reliable than conventional spinning hard drives.
Always buy from a reliable brand name. Many SSD brands are unreliable, but that reliability has been improving greatly. I like SanDisk and Samsung SSD's the best.
SSD's should never ever be defragmented as this will lead to reduced performance and eventually to premature failure.
I recommend image backups (Paragon or Acronis software) for your trading computer, particularly with SSDs. An image backup exactly copies the entire drive and stores it as a really big file on a backup hard drive. A backup hard drive is necessary because image files are too big to backup to cloud storage.
Image backup can be used to combat viruses, weird problems with Windows and to quickly recover from a solid state drive failure.
