Best HD for Gaming

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darkecho

Weaksauce
Joined
Jul 9, 2004
Messages
106
Ok a few question here...

1. what is the best hard drive, or the best hard drive qualities, for a gamer? As far as i know, the larger a drive is, the slower it can potentially be... is this true? I need help understanding what is necessary for a good gaming computer situation..

CPU and GPU aside, what is necessary for high frame rate for games? obviously you want fast RAM and a good amount (2 gigs?) but what is the harddrives role with gaming?

I think its role is just getting the gaming information (textures, maps, models) to the RAM for use correct? like say when i play HL2, the map loads and the harddrive reads the info and sends it all to ram right? so is the hard drives job over after loading? I am really looking to get high frame rates and make sure that my harddrive is not the bottle neck...

what kind of seek times and rpms should i be looking for? throughput?

and another thing, how does HD cache affect anything? I dont understand what having more HD cache helps to do,

sorry for the multiple questions, please answer as many as you can :D
 
1.) Harddrives are typically not the bottleneck in game loading, there are a few games where harddrives make alot of difference, but it won't effect everygame.
2.) A larger harddrive tends to have higher latency but with developments they've made it a pretty much non-issue.
3.) 2 gigs is decent for ram, most games utilize that quite nicely, beyond that there are some limits in windows, which can be change with some boot flags, that allow beyond 2gig to be used for a process BUT the program needs to be coded to take advantage of it I believe, might be wrong on that.
4.) Harddrive after loading a game typically...just sits and spins....
5.) Framerate should not ever, EVER effect frame rate unless something is configured horribly wrong.
6.) seek times right now usually vary around 12ms for 7200 rpm drives, and throughtput on modern drives pushes close to 40-60MB sustained for the average drive.
7.) cache can improve burst read speeds as long as what's being read fits into cache.

If I've stated anything wrong, please feel free to correct me, gotta learn somehow.
 
darkecho said:
thanks for your response, only quesiton is could you please clarify #4, thanks!

I think ill just get this SATA150 drive on newegg with 200gb, 16mb cache, and NCQ...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822140168
other than that its specs are:
RPM 7200 RPM
Average Seek Time 9ms
Average Latency 4.17ms
sound good? Thanks!
Click to expand...


#4 once a game is loaded, typically there is nothing for the drive to do...so it...spins...
 
defakto said:
2.) A larger harddrive tends to have higher latency but with developments they've made it a pretty much non-issue.
.
Click to expand...

Larger hard drives have higher densities and are usually faster, i.e less head movement to pull the same amount of data off the platter. I say usually because it's GBs per platter that counts, e.g. a drive with 2*80 GB platters will generally perform better than one with with 4*40 GB platters, SR.com's reviews have consistantly shown this.
 
WD740GD > Deskstar 7K500 > WD4000KD > Hitachi T7K250 > 16MB Maxtor/WD2500KS. Find the drive that meets your budget as well as your capacity, environmental, and performance requirements.
 
Well, framerates are cpu bound and videocards bound, the only time harddrives come into play in that is if the game loads data on the fly OR you have to little memory in the system and it hits the page file during play. Other than those two specific situations, harddrives will not affect framerates, a 15k scsi drive won't give you better frames rates than a 7200 rpm drive.
 
Got the 400GB WD4000KD myself from zipzoomfly for about 200 bucks with free 2 day shipping, so thats a good deal imho at least for me. Look on ebay, they sometimes have some good deals, but i tend to buy my drives new if i can from an established site rather than ebay since the last one i got bit the dust after 2-3 months. (was used... :( )
Can't go wrong with the ones Douglite mentioned tho. Depends what you need it for and how much room you want.
 
defakto said:
Well, framerates are cpu bound and videocards bound, the only time harddrives come into play in that is if the game loads data on the fly OR you have to little memory in the system and it hits the page file during play. Other than those two specific situations, harddrives will not affect framerates, a 15k scsi drive won't give you better frames rates than a 7200 rpm drive.
Click to expand...
I just wanted to point out a specific example with one game...World of Warcraft.

Without a suitable amount of ram (1GB seems to be the sweet spot) the game will page the crap out of your disk when walking into certain areas (The Commons in IronForge) and in other high traffic areas. I moved the page file away from where the game was installed and since then it's been much more responsive in those situations.

I myself only run with 512MB so it was a necessary adjustment. Just throwing out a real-world example. :)
 
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