wondering if you have any experience with using a solid state drive to improve backtest machine performance. I am upgrading from 8GB to 16GB memory and thought maybe if I ran WLP from a SSD it would also help improve the backtest strain on my machine.

My larger backtest datasets are about 90000 samples which slows my machine to a crawl and makes it difficult to do other tasks.

Switch to a reliable SSD built on Intel or Marvel controllers and you will never be going back, leaving your HDDs to NAS or media player. SSD greatly improves file access.

Hi,
Just my two cents. Make sure you get an SSD with 200GB+ capacity. I have ultra-fast intel 100gb ssd on my pc (2 yrs old), by the time you load windows,MS office, VS20xx,adobe, WLP and any other software you use, there is hardly any room left to store your WLP data. So, even when i have 100gb ssd, my WLP data ended up on the secondary non-ssd 500gb HD drive. I needed only 30-40 extra GB for the WLP data :(. Now i don't feel like cloning my SSD to upgrade to bigger SSD as i am afraid i may screw up a working pc in the process.

You'll be amazed how many crap bloatware is there that you can safely clean up and then almost any SSD will do - even 60Gb.

Shrink pagefile to 0.5 GB, turn off hibernation, purge old Nvidia drivers, clean up WinSxS, then Win SDKs installed by VS20xx, SQL Server leftovers, Service Pack backups, finally, minimize the space eaten up by Windows system protection - and you just saved a couple dozen Gigabytes of space.

Hi Eugene,
I think you might be right. When I add up all the folder space on c: drive by looking at the size using folder=>properties. I always see a a gap of 20-30gb on my SSD. I had spoken with the HP tech support regarding this issue but they couldn't answer my question. I assumed it is some hidden file on the drive that i can't see or that the SSD is defective and has bad sectors. I do have hibernation off and also routinly clean out the old restore points and keep only the latest.
This is what my c: drive looks like.

windows 39.2GB
users 12.02gb
SWSetup 2.5gn
Program(x86) 9gb
Program 1.5gb

The Windows folder has grown too big -- to the size where it can be probably cut in half. Most likely, it's the infamous WinSxS folder and Service Pack backups.

Thanks for the info. Will try to clean out WinSxS.

I purchased a new laptop. It has a Core i7 CPU at 2.4Ghz 16GB ram. My desktop has a Core i7 2.67Ghz 18GB ram

http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/169/Intel_Core_i7_Mobile_i7-4700MQ_vs_Intel_Core_i7_i7-920.html


Laptop has a 250GB solid state hard drive while the desktop is conventional 750GB @ 7200rpm

The laptop runs my strategies faster. Does disk drive speed trump processor speed in general for WL?

Besides writing better code. Are there other improvements to be made?

QUOTE:
Does disk drive speed trump processor speed in general for WL?

SSD is a big factor in speed improvement, but "trump" is not the right word here. Strategy execution speed depends on many factors like enabled visualizers, number of symbols (especially when applying a strategy on a large DataSet), WL settings (on demand data update in the first place), data loading range and so on. SSD will greatly cut down the overhead incurred from disk I/O (those large DataSets), but it's not a factor in the time it takes a Strategy code to execute -- this depends on CPU.