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Best gaming HD?

S

st4rk

Gawd
Joined
Sep 19, 2003
Messages
1,013
I am still using my trusty ol 8mb cache wd 80gb hd. I love it, so much quieter and faster than my seagate 160gb sata 8mb cache hd.

The seagate I have sucks, it's loud as hell, I can hear it across the room, and it just dies when windows has to do a memory dump when a program crashes, and especially makes a ton of noise when windows boots.

I'd like to install windows on my wd's, but they have no space, and I use them for my games, and generally like to keep windows install completely seperate from my games (hence the reason i have them on seperate hd's).

Anyways, I saw a benchmark recently and it mentioned that wd's have the best i/o performance, seagates have the best transfer rate, and the new maxtors have the best bandwidth.

so which of those is most important when gaming? normally when you game it has to load a ton of textures from the hd, like in WoW when loading zones, or in CS when loading a map after joining a server.

commense thoughts.
 
I'm not exactly sure, but i believe I/O rates will benifit most games during play(as in loading levels dynamically like WoW does, not framerate) as that's probably small transfers of data relative to time. I could be wrong though.
 
st4rk said:
I am still using my trusty ol 8mb cache wd 80gb hd. I love it, so much quieter and faster than my seagate 160gb sata 8mb cache hd.

The seagate I have sucks, it's loud as hell, I can hear it across the room, and it just dies when windows has to do a memory dump when a program crashes, and especially makes a ton of noise when windows boots.

I'd like to install windows on my wd's, but they have no space, and I use them for my games, and generally like to keep windows install completely seperate from my games (hence the reason i have them on seperate hd's).

Anyways, I saw a benchmark recently and it mentioned that wd's have the best i/o performance, seagates have the best transfer rate, and the new maxtors have the best bandwidth.

so which of those is most important when gaming? normally when you game it has to load a ton of textures from the hd, like in WoW when loading zones, or in CS when loading a map after joining a server.

commense thoughts.
Click to expand...

The only real difference you would notice would probably be a 10k raptor because of its 30% improvement on access times. This would translate into less hitches when entering a new area or having to use virtual memory to load large amounts of characters on screen. You can't really look at synthetic benchmarks they in no way represent how a game uses a hard drive.
 
For the best gaming experience:

A) Make sure you have plenty of physical RAM - It's MUCH faster than any hard drive, and 1GB of physical RAM is cheaper than any 'performance' hard drive, so there's no reason to game with any less.

B) Keep background disk activity to a minimum, or have a separate spindle to service background stuff like playing MP3s, and hosting the OS. Also limit the possibility of background tasks such as anti-virus from running during your gaming sessions.

C) Defragmenting is important. It's bad enough that your hard drive may have to seek between different files - you're making its job way too complicated (and too long) if you force it to seek to different locations just to retrieve parts of an individual file.

D) Once you have acheieved an optimized system, and are faced with using your hard drive being unavoidable, such as when loading levels in FPS games or entering new areas in MMORPGs, the two most important attributes of storage performance are buffer optimization and localized seek performance. Right now, that means buying a 73GB Raptor. If you can't afford one or need more than 70GB of fast storage, you'll need to look at the 7200RPM drives with the best buffer strategies, and that means Hitachi, the 16MB Maxtor drives, and then WD's 7200 RPM drives if you don't like either of those. The other makers don't have either the buffer stategy, seek performance (or neither) to be competitive. Check out the Buyer's Guide to find out what the good drives are for various price ranges.

E) Unfortunately, there's no magic benchmark that tells you who's got the best buffer strategy. A quality average read service time benchmark gives you an idea of seek performance, but the drive simply needs to know the buffer tricks before it will be effective. SR's application capture tests come closer than any raw transfer/seek test, but their test suite is now very dated. They are in the process of assembling a new testbed, but it's not been implemented yet. There's no way desktop/gaming hard drive performance would be where it is today if the drives had to seek to everything - buffer hits are crucial. Maxtor has a huge advantage right now as they have a buffer twice the size of anyone else's - they can read ahead and guess twice as much, dramatically increasing the probability that they'll have a request in buffer and not have to seek for it.
 
Good post doug, looks like I'll be getting a maxtor to install windows on.

Then I'll just use my seagate for storage.

What hardocp should start doing (or tomshardware) is gaming benchmarks for hd's. For instance, time the hard drive's loading times for the popular games like cs, wow, far cry, max payne, unreal.

On a map load or new area load, see which hard drive helps in loading it faster. Maybe on a computer with 512mb ram, and 1024mb ram.

Another issue I come up with is page files, and ram. How can you really tell if windows is using the page file or ram?? And how can you limit the amount of page file it uses? Make it smaller? Make it really small as in 50mb? I've seen things such as making it 3 times your ram, putting it on a seperate hard drive, or making two seperate ones on seperate hd's. It's pretty confusing and not one theory is really tested.

How do you guys normally set your page files?
 
st4rk said:
Good post doug, looks like I'll be getting a maxtor to install windows on.

T\What hardocp should start doing (or tomshardware) is gaming benchmarks for hd's. For instance, time the hard drive's loading times for the popular games like cs, wow, far cry, max payne, unreal.
Click to expand...

Storagereview.com already has a gaming benchmark suite that just does that.
 
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