Drive setup focused on load times

[[L]imey]

Hello all,

Thanks for having a look for me. I'm on the verge of spending ~150 bucks for some new drives for my desktop gaming machine. I'm looking at 3 options, and I was hoping someone could point me to benchmarks or give me their opinions if they have hands on experience with these solutions.

My current hard drive is a 320g Seagate with 16m cache. It's been in my computer since I built it last year, it runs ok.

My primary focus of this drive upgrade is to make game load times as fast as possible (operating system load time wouldn't hurt either, but I imagine one will likely accomplish the other.) Space isn't really a concern as I tend to scrap stuff I'm not using anyway, and backup things I might want to use later to dvd. So, knowing these things, my options boil down to:

a pair of these
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136319
I have onboard raid I believe, but haven't ever used it, so I'd be setting that up from scratch.

or

one of these
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227373
This would obviously hold the OS and whatever games/apps were current for me, with all data on the existing seagate.

or

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136296
This would function like the SSD in that it would just hold OS, games, and apps, but would leave me a bit more room to keep additional things installed. Remember though, loading speeds is the most important factor here.

Please comment and let me know what you think. I'm unclear as to which aspect of a drive, whether its read, write, or seeks impacts the load times the most.

Thanks much.

 

[InvisiBill]

What exactly are you loading?

SSDs have very fast random seek times (since it's memory, you don't have to wait for a read-write head to move to that part of the drive). This makes them great for accessing things scattered all over a drive.

The 6401AALS is a great performing hard drive, but it still faces all the physical limitations of any hard drive. If you're accessing data on different parts of the disk, it simply takes time for the read-write head to move around.

The VelociRaptor is sort of the middle ground. The faster rotational speed plus the fact that it's only a 2.5" drive mean the physical hard drive accesses are quicker, reducing seek times.

If you're loading small bits of random data, the SSD will be much faster. If you're loading large blocks of contiguous data, then the hard drive won't compare as badly. The VR seems to be only slightly better than the 6401AALS in most cases, so I don't think I could personally justify spending that much on it. The SSD is a totally different beast which will be much faster in a lot of cases, and only marginally faster or possibly even slower in a few cases. RAID on the 6401AALS will also mean that you're splitting your disk accesses over two sets of hardware - think of it as one drive handling the first half of the data and the other handling the second half simultaneously. Depending on exactly what you're doing, sorted defrags can group similar files together to keep a hard drive's heads more focused in one place.