Originally posted by rtstrading
This question pertains more to MetaStock than Tradestation or eSignal.
I am a Metastock Pro realtime user, and use many one minute charts with each having a few indicators. The hard drive is operating almost continuously in this configuration. I use eSignal as the data feed for the MS charting. It is interesting to note that I also have numerous charts and indicators setup in eSignal, but the hard drive does not exhibit the same continuous operation as in MS. I have MS configured for live realtime bars.
MS is saving the one minute data to the hard drive, unlike eSignal, but it that the only difference. MS is very slow under these conditions!
Are Tradestation and Wealth Lab hard drive hogs also?
Your question needs to be qualified. TS has several different flavors still in use, TS4, TS200i, TS6.
Before TS6, Tradestation used to work as most other software works. That is, it uses a data gathering scheme where the historical data is stored locally on your machine. These versions of Tradestation would have similar disk access performance similar to MS.
Beginning with TS6, Omega made the HUGE leap of making the data available at anytime from THEIR servers - all that is kept on your machine is a "cache" amount of data (this is the way that QCharts works also.) So even if your machine goes down or your Internet conection goes down, when you re-establish your connection to the TS6 servers, the cache is refreshed and you still have access to all the data. As a result, the disk activity is kept to a minimum (just keep the cache "full.")
In addition, in the past I used to track a bunch of symbols because I never new if I would like to trade them, overloading the system even more. With TS6, you don't need to track every symbol to do historical testing - if you open a new chart and request the data, it goes and gets what it needs.
Omega has come a long way with TS6 - now if they would only offer a .01c per share or better with a cap at say 1500 shares, offer MOO and MOC orders, bring in RadarScreen into TS6 with full adaptibility, allow DDE or Socket access from other programs, offer bullets, allow window linking and the other 100 obvious improvements in this area that traders have been asking for, and beef up EasyLanguage (you still don't have access to the Bid/Ask from EasyLanguage- unnacceptable), it would once again be head and shoulders above the rest.
One thing I love about Wealth-Lab is the fact that a chart and the data that feed the chart are seperable, as opposed to TS where they are inseperable. In TS, if you want data and you want to do testing or alerts on that data, it MUST be put into a chart - if they did away with this I would be eggsztatic (<- misspelled on purpose.) A chart should be VIEW of the data, just like a "RadarScreen" is another view on the data. What if I want to View my data by using a "Fighter Pilot Cockpit" metaphor with dials and crosshairs? I should be allowed to see the data as I please, not with canned OHLC 2D charts. Omega needs to use the Model-View-Controller design pattern to design TS and it needs to expose this in an API - it would then be a thing to behold and open up a whole new world to outside developers....
nitro
