Building A Bot Server (Part 4 of 7)

In our continuing series on building a bot server for your bot empire, we discussed memory last time and how you need to be careful of the 32-bit addressing problem. Let's continue our series.

Hard drives

In the old days, hard drive selection was fairly simple: Hard drives were like a garage: bigger means more space to put stuff in. These days however, it is more complicated. Rotation speed, hybrid drives, Solid state drives versus platter as well as the simple capacity can overwhelm the non-technical person. Fortunately, you have me to guide you through this detail.

Since the machine we are building is going to be a server, storage is not a main concern. However, speed will be. The more servers that are operating, the faster the hard drive needs to be in order to keep up with the demand. Otherwise, the bot will appear slow and may discourage customers at best and fail you at worst.

This is why in situations like this, I recommend a solid state drive of a minimum 150 Gigs in size. This allows you to allocate 30 Gigs for each of three (3) bots and still have space left over.

But space isn't the main concern: speed is and while a solid state drives is not as fast as memory, a solid state drive is going to be significantly faster than a spindle hard drive. This will increase reliability and since the drive isn't physically rotating 10,000 times a minute, thus, fewer parts to break down.

A word of advice: NEVER EVER attempt to defragment a solid state drive. There is absolutely no benefit towards putting large files together as physical proximity is not a concern for an SSD drive and the amount of wear and tear an SSD drive experiences while under going a defragmentation procedure actually shortens its life.