Bottleneck?

Gfreeman

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Feb 10, 2006
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Hey guys I want to know if having a older hard drive can bottleneck your system. I've always upgraded my systems but the last time i bought a hard drive was like 3 years ago. I've made new systems but i keep using the same hard drives becuase i dont really need that much space. You guys think i will see any significant peformance increase if i buy a sata 2 drive?
 

zoridon

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Dec 9, 2005
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as long as you have a lot of ram "2 gigs preferably" it will only affect your load times for games with the older hard drive. Once game is loaded it will not significantly slow your system down.
 

TabrisDarkPeace

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Jan 11, 2006
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What HDDs are you running now, and how well do they perform ?

http://www.sisoftware.co.uk - SiSoft SANDRA is quite good as measuring HDD performance, and can generate reports in .TXT and .HTML (and other) formats.

Now that you've got a yardstick to measure with, how many fold an improvement are you after ?

A typical 120 - 250 GB, 7200rpm, 8 MB - 16 MB cache, ATA100 - SATA1 + NCQ HDD might be ample for what you want for all we know.

Speed wise, the new 147 GB / 150 GB Western Digital Raptor (10,000 rpm) is the king, and then in RAID-0 using a 16 - 64 KB stripe (and 8 KB cluster) size is even better, but it'll cost you a fair bit.
 

zoridon

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Dec 9, 2005
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need to know your budget, but I am impressed with the new raptors if I had the coin and was not a tightwad I'd get that and be at the top of the game for a few years. Otherwise I like the Maxtor sata drives I use a 300 gig sata maxtor in my gaming rig. check out storagereview.com for in depth performance analysis