It will go much quicker if you can consolidate/sort all of your daily files into a single file and then sort them by code.
Let's say you have 5000 securities to convert for each day.
If you have daily files, it will process them one day at a time, opening and closing each of the 5000 securities for each day.
If you consolidate them into one file, sort them, then convert, you'll find that it will open each security only once, dramatically increasing the speed.
e.g. I was able to convert over 18000 securities each with around 20 years of history securities in about 2 hours on my pretty quick PC.
Another way of speeding things up is to exclude both your ASCII and MetaStock folders from your real-time virus checking. This typically results in a 50% reduction in time on my PC to read/write files in this area.
The alternative is to subscribe to a data vendor that can automatically provide your data in MetaStock format with no conversion required.
The other thing to watch out for is that daily ASCII files have no way of providing any corporate actions (such as stock splits, code change and delistings) so your database will rapidly become untidy unless you really keep on top of the maintenance.
Cheers,
Richard.
www.premiumdata.net