Upgrading ATA hard drive question

[Seyba]

I currently have a Western Digital Caviar 200gb Special edition which I think has 8mb of cache, here is the link to its specifications http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144129 . Note that it ues ATA-133.

If I upgraded to a newer technology such as the Seagate Perpendiculat Recording Technology 320GB SATA drive, would there be an increase in performance, especially during games? Or is the upgrade not really worth it, and better spent somewhere else? Or do you have another hard drive I should upgrade to? Keep in mind I want to keep the drive relatively quiet so a raptor is probably out of the question.

Thanks.

 

[Lamont Cranston]

IMO you might see a little performance increase but nothing drastic, and the increase would just be in load times - it wouldn't help your fps.....

 

[Seyba]

I know it wouldn't give me a direct increase in frames, but would it lessen stuttering if something loads in the distance, like when Oblivion loads new cells in the background?

What kind of map loading benefit would I notice?

 

[drizzt81]

it's hard for anyone to say quantitatively how much of a benefit you would see, since there just aren't any real-world, reproducable benchmarks available.

We can give you a qualitative "it ought to be faster" answer, but making a statement about noticability requires quantiative analysis.

 

[Seyba]

Thanks.

Sounds like upgrading from ATA to SATA isn't really for performance but for convenience.

Is the raptor's performance noticeable, or is that another question that isn't a simple yes or no answer? I have my current WD in a hard drive enclosure that essentially suspends it on bands of rubber, and it makes no noise. I wonder if the raptor would still be audible over, say, a video card fan.

 

[amdfan25]

Thanks.

Sounds like upgrading from ATA to SATA isn't really for performance but for convenience.

Is the raptor's performance noticeable, or is that another question that isn't a simple yes or no answer? I have my current WD in a hard drive enclosure that essentially suspends it on bands of rubber, and it makes no noise. I wonder if the raptor would still be audible over, say, a video card fan.

All I can tell you is that after getting my Raptor load times for getting into Windows XP is significantly faster than my old IDE WD 120. Audible wise I have no clue, the fans in my case drown out most of the HD noise and I got like 4 HDs.