Best gaming hard drive?

J

Jon55

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Aside from SSDs (mainly due to cost at this time), what are among the top gaming hard drives?

The Velociraptor is an obvious hard-to-beat contender, but from what I understand some 1TB drives have been able to nearly match it.

So what (non-SSD) hard drive is considered the best for gaming?
 
the Velociraptor is the fastest spinning hard drive, but you can find a ssd for less than that. HOW IS IT MAINLY DO TO COST?????!?!?!?!??!?!?!????!??!?!?!?
 
Shane_c82 said:
I'm assuming he means SSD's are more expensive, especially the high quality ones.
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Look guy, his final inquiry is "So what (non-SSD) hard drive is considered the best for gaming?"

Answer: Velociraptor, DING DING DING DING!!!!!

Price of Velociraptor on newegg: 180 dollars
Cost of a "High quality SSD" 32Gb Vertex (im talking about high quality, not high capacity for the little newbies who don't understand what words mean): 149 dollars

Well lets see here. *scratches head* SSDs are LESS EXPENSIVE SHANE, THEY ARE LESS EXPENSIVE!!!!!!
 
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Wow, go sleep it off buddy.

He's looking for a gaming hard drive so I'm going to also assume a 64GB SSD won't be enough space considering the large games of today and in the future. 128GB SSD will be well over $200.

ZodaEX said:
HOW IS IT MAINLY DO TO COST?????!?!?!?!??!?!?!????!??!?!?!?
Click to expand...

You asked the question and I answered it. Are there SSD cheaper than a Velociraptor? DUH, yes, but he's looking for a gaming hard drive so not sure if a 64GB would be enough.

So OP, the 150GB Velociraptor.
 
i doubt 64 would be enough. Like he said todays games are HUGe. 5gb 4gb.
 
Shockey said:
i doubt 64 would be enough. Like he said todays games are HUGe. 5gb 4gb.
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I know tons of people who only play Wow and not other games (and i mean a lot of people), but are very heavily into it and want the fastest load times possible. In this case, even a 30gig SSD would be big enough. In my case, theres not any games I like that are 4-5 Gigs, yet I'm a big time gamer. For some reason, all my favorite games are under 2GB and even if I installed every game I own on my SSD I couldn't fill it up. The question was whats the fastest hard drive. Thats it. I assume the only reason he mentioned the 1TB drive is because they are very fast. Hence my assuming speed is more important to him than capacity. It's the only information were given to work with.
 
matrix563 said:
a drive in 5 years :p ;)
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Whats so bad about that? Last month I needed my A drive to install AHCI drivers into windows XP cause you can't use ssds or usb sticks to do it. Just because you have no use for something dosen't mean other people don't.
 
I ran with the Velociraptor in the end, its 300Gb and stands up well against the SSDs, to get the equivelent space in a SSD you're looking at least twice the price if not more.

Games are getting pretty big now, I've just installed and patched Age Of Conan and the install folder is 26.7Gb, looking through my games folder I also have 6.39Gb used on Brothers In Arms Hells Highway, 7.78Gb used on Prototype, WAR (Warhammer online) is 10.1Gb, Necrovision is 7.61Gb. My steam folder is just shy of 50Gb, I wont even go there!

In short a 32Gb SSD would do you Windows OS and maybe Age of Conan and thats it...or about 5-6 games around the 6-7Gb each mark.
 
It depends on the ops needs.
If like me he wants to keep nearly all the games he has ever bought installed, capacity is key.
Speed is also a consideration and luckily you can have your cake and eat it.

The new(ish) drives with 500GB platters give the fastest transfer rates (for mainstream affordable drives).
I'm using the Samsung F1 1TB drives which have 330GB platters and are pretty quick - 117MB/s max sustained, 93MB/s avg sustained.
The 500GB/platter drives have proportionally faster data transfer rates.
Bear in mind that seek times remain approximately constant between these drives.
So any drive that has been found to not have reliability flaws that uses 500GB platters will do.
 
ZodaEX said:
Look guy, his final inquiry is "So what (non-SSD) hard drive is considered the best for gaming?"

Answer: Velociraptor, DING DING DING DING!!!!!

Price of Velociraptor on newegg: 180 dollars
Cost of a "High quality SSD" 32Gb Vertex (im talking about high quality, not high capacity for the little newbies who don't understand what words mean): 149 dollars

Well lets see here. *scratches head* SSDs are LESS EXPENSIVE SHANE, THEY ARE LESS EXPENSIVE!!!!!!
Click to expand...

Do you need a nap?

SSDs are awesome but come on, 64 GB is "cute" at best, except they don't have a "cute" price tag. And 32GB is a joke. Of course this'll change in the future, but I'm looking at the now. HENCE why I said SSDs are out (again, for now). Games are only getting bigger. No I don't have every game I own installed but I don't want to have one installed at a time either. I keep around 4-7 at the most installed at any one time (all of which are pretty new).
 
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Exactly, Jon, I have the same attitude.

I will start considering SSDs when the mainstream most-affordable ones are at ~128GB capacity.

Even then, I'm thinking probably of buying two, one for OS and one for games.
 
Even older games are fairly big. C&C3 is what, 4 years old and its 6GB. Dawn of War 2 is ~6GB. m Empire Total is 15GB. Neverwinter Nights 2 with expansions is 15GB. Valve games which is very system friendly are all in the 5GB+ range. Hell even Baldur's Gate + Baldur's Gate 2 with expansions, circa 1998, easily hits 25GB and this is before you even start playing the game.

One way is to simply juggle games by installing the game you are currently playing on your SSD and keep the rest as image files on your storage drive.
 
I've tried the following:

  1. single 74gb raptor
  2. pair of wd 6401aals
  3. single 6401aals
  4. single 60gb vertex
  5. now a 150gb velociraptor

I play bf2142 frequently, crysis sometimes, grid sometimes, and have played far cry 2 on this machine.

Here's my take...

The 74gb raptor was quick for loading apps and games. I really had no problem with it. I upgraded to the raid setup due to all the hype I heard (read) about how badass it (matrix raid w/ wd black drives) was supposed to be.

The 6401aals raid setup showed me nothing (performance wise) for gaming (load times or otherwise), word processing, internet use, or dvd conversion. I eventually dismantled the array due to long windows load times and every time I changed a piece of hardware the array would rebuild itself.

The single 6401aals felt a tad snappier loading programs and games than the raid array. I enjoyed saving a few seconds on my windows loadup (green bar thingy). This setup was just fine, but, I was caugth up in all the ssd hype, so I sprung for one. A 60gb vertex.

The vertex was pretty snappy, but reminded me of the 74gb raptor. It felt a tiny bit faster, but no night and day difference in my experience. It loaded word processing a second faster. bf2142 loaded in exactly the same amount of time, as did crysis and fc2.

I ended up selling it and getting a 120gb for a little while too. No big difference, just larger.

Well, I got my velociraptor 150gb today. It feels very close to the ssd for performance in my apps. Bf2142 feels just as quick as the ssd. Word opend just as fast, etc.

So, overall, I bought the raid hype, and I was unimpressed. I bought the ssd hype, was a tiny bit impressed but the $ was more useful elsewhere (upgraded to gtx285). So, long story short... I have a velociraptor now, and IMHO, it is the best hard drive for my uses at the price point.

Please don't flame me guys, this is my honest opinion as I have experienced with the actual apps I use daily. I don't do 3dstudio, autocad, photoshop, or anything like that, so my experiences are limited to what I've listed here.

My $0.02 :)
 
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I've been saying this for months and crazed SSD fanboys (99.999% of the time, people who do not own SSDs) start jumping on me like defensive Kobe fans.

If your PC usage is the typical netbook use (surfing, word processing) and tack on videos and occasional gaming, SSD will have limited gains. Some games will improve. However, due to the nature of the evolution of Microsoft Windows, with aggressive indexing, pre-fetching, lowered pagefile use, applications becoming more CPU bound, there's no reason getting an SSD for "basic tasks."

Now if you do any semblance of productivity work, the difference starts to escalate due to increased disc access. For my use, I find very noticeable gains with an SSD. But if I'm just chilling and doing typical "gamer" tasks, it's hit or miss.
 
I've had all different types of setups and drives, RAID, non-RAID. I will say my two R0'd Vertex 120's are by far the fastest solution I've ever owned, from single/multiple/x3 VR's etc, even other SSD brands/types. Night and day. Game loading times, file transfers, app/OS installs etc. Vertex SSD's have been a godsend for me. I like my X-25m at work as well. Huge real-life benefits, but then, I use the hell out of all of my computers. I sometimes have 20-30 windows / apps running (including Outlook which is a hog) with multiple IE tabs going in each, while simultaneously transferring multiple huge .iso files over the LAN. This is where even a Velociraptor has (single or RAID) has just become a head-thrashing slow down. The SSD's just freakin' get it down.
 
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Solid state is obviously going to be the must have enthusiast product in the coming years.

Until that time I strongly suggest you go with a single 10,000RPM drive. Yes, single, as in, no RAID 0. Raid 0 is WORTHLESS for gaming with a conventional non SSD drive because it trades random access times for increased sustained read/write speed and that just does not benefit you in gaming. The low random access times--the time it takes to pull up a number of small files, is what I believe gives you the better operating system responsiveness and game load times. Certain specific applications benefit from RAID zero but gaming and everyday computing just is not one of them. The synthetic benchmarks show RAID0 to be all that, but honestly if I had a choice between a single velociraptor and two velociraptor's in raid 0 I would bet on better overall performance from the single drive.

RAID 0 seems to make more sense with solid state drives because there is no rotational latency to speak of.
 
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