Access Speed vs. Transfer Rate and Storage Space for a Gaming Machine

[Erdrick]

I'm building a gaming machine and am thinking of getting this hard drive:

Western Digital Raptor WD1500ADFD 150GB 10,000 RPM SATA 1.5Gb/s

I would like to know the pros and cons of getting a drive with more space and higher transfer rate at the expense of lower RPM. Say, for example, this one:

Seagate Barracuda ES.2 500GB 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s

I do not store/download much on my computer so the space issue is not imporant for that, but I'm wondering what effects it has on performance.

Is the bettter transfer rate going to be more noticealbe in-game than the higher RPM?

[EQTakeOffense]

To be honest, there wont be too big of a difference in terms of daily performance between the two drives. The biggest difference will be load times. Because of the fast rotation speed, the Raptor can access data faster, and thus 'load', it quicker. Games tend to respond better to access times (loading a level) then they do by transfer rate, for games, the big transfer rate will be in RAM, as that's where most of the game information you'll need on screen will be stored. So, basically, a game loads what it needs to in RAM from the hard drive, and this is dependent on how fast it can load, not how much. Think about it this way, when you're walking around a corner in a game, and suddenly you get 'lag' (assuming you're not online) that's data loading from your hard drive to your RAM, and the faster your hard drive can access the data and send it to the RAM, the more 'smooth' your 'lag' you'll get.

Now, if you're moving huge files back and forth, you'll be better off with transfer rates, because you're not so concerned with how fast the data is accessed, but rather how fast it is transfered. The difference is that games tend to use lots of smaller files, as opposed to a few large files. Take for example my WoW folder, it has '343 Items' comprising of '7.43GB'. This is different then say, two 4.2GB .iso files. In this case, you're better off worrying about transfer speed, or how fast the hard drive can move the data, not how fast it can access the data.

Obviously these two things are interrelated. And preferably you want both high transfer rate and high access times. This is the advantage of RAID-0, you'll get higher transfer rates and nice access times, although with the trade-off of a higher failure rate.

[robman_rob]

Wow is composed of a few large files mainly.

[Erdrick]

Thank you, that was clear and helpful.