7,200 vs 10,000rpm: Increased gaming performance?

[ZenTrickz]

Hey all. I'm in the process of putting together a gaming rig on a reasonable budget. I'm looking into hard drives now, and was wondering if anyone knows if there is a performance increase in PC games going from 7,200 rpm to a 10,000 rpm. I mean the latter does spin over 25% faster so I've always assumed it does increase performance. Although I was reading in some thread that... it was either the RPM speed... or maybe it was Raid... that didn't increase gaming performance. It only decreases loading times, for say booting up your computer or loading an application.

Western Digital 160GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive -- $95.00
Capacity: 160GB
Average Seek Time: 8.9 ms
Buffer: 8MB
Rotational Speed: 7200 RPM
Interface: Serial ATA

Western Digital Raptor 36.7GB 10,000RPM SATA -- $109.00
Capacity: 36.7GB
Average Seek Time: 5.2 ms
Buffer: 8MB
Rotational Speed: 10000 RPM
Interface: Serial ATA

By the way I plan to link 2 of one of the above in Raid 0, if that has any factor in your advice. Both are relatively same in price, but I'm having difficulties deciding on which to get. One has an immense capacity of memory, but the other maybe faster. Advice and suggestions are needed please!

 

[neonblingbling]

I was recently going to pick up a Raptor myself. Some things I picked up was that a single 74GB raptor would out perform two 36GB in RAID 0, because of the low average seek time. RAID 0 with these hard drives actually didnt really help, but might hurt it because of the latency.

The 10k hard drives, however, mostly afected just loading times, and not say, FPS. So, if its a budget machine, I'd go (went) with the large hard drive (no raid, kinda risky) and use the money towards a better video card or something.

 

[cooter]

Link neon said Raid will only help iwth load times, it will not effect your FPS at all in the game. but for me having a 15,000 rpm HD tends to load maps in games about twice as fast. And in all reality the Raid will not give you a performance increase with load times either, both Vio and I have done tests with ide, raptors, and SCSI drives in Raid0, almost no performance increase.

 

[ps2cho]

yea it will reduce loading times as it can access the file, and transfer the data faster...so for gaming yea u will see a slight performance increase...nothing that is amazing...

 

[ZenTrickz]

Wow no kidding. Almost sounds like to me Raid is sort of useless.
Hey I was wondering if anyone knows the difference between SATA, and SATA II?
I think the new SLI boards that are due to be released have SATA II supported. If I were to build a new PC, would getting a SATA II hard drive add any performance? Also how is SATA II in Raid 0?

 

[schismspeak]

No a SATA II harddrive will likely not be faster than Sata, the only thing different is the interface, the drive itself is not faster, therefore raid in SATA II should not be any faster than raid in SATA, because as I sort of said above, the interface is not the bottle neck, the drive itself is.

 

[ZenTrickz]

Ah gotcha bud! Thanks thanks
Lol last question for ya. Will SATA II drives be compatible with just regular SATA mother boards? And SATA drives be compatible on SATA II compatible boards?

 

[sipherblade]

i hate to argue with people so i will simply say that i recently got a 36 gig raptor and it does make a big dif in load times for apps but not for games unless you use a no cd patch then its reading strictly from the hd instead of from the cd.BHD, COD, NFSU, and Doom all saw an increased load time and less lag. so i guess it depends on your set up. if that helps at all.

 

[schismspeak]

correct sipherblade, you may have less 'lag' with games that 'overflow' the ram on your video card and in your system onto your harddrive, if you have a gig of ram or more it shouldn't make much difference, if you have less, it could make some difference.
Zen, I am not sure, i'll let someone else answer that.

 

[CandymanCan]

I got my 36gb raptor recently cuss my 7200rpm 40gb maxtor was over 3 years old, i only need like 40gb of HDD space and i wanted faster loading times in video games, i would have gotten then 74gb raptor it will just outa my price range, overall im happy with my Raptor, i think i have to RMA it tho cuss its making chirping noises which i think is caused by a dry bearing in the drive.

 

[X1ggy]

Ditto on faster RPM's = faster loading times, not better performance. If you're concerned with keeping your rig cool, the faster RPM drives may also generate more heat than their slower counterparts - just something to keep in mind.

X1g