will a 2nd HDD help?

[Jclonts82]

I would sure appreciate any help here.
I am a gamer, and have a fairly new computer that uses SATA (I think) hard drives , there are four places to plug them in on the MOBO.

My question is, I want to know if I get a faster second drive and run the games on it, will that help speed things up or not. I am 90% sure the slowest link in my system is the hard drive, and I want to get a 10,000 or 15,000 rpm drive. But dont want to serously shell out for large storage capacity. so like a 37 gig just to have the games on, OS on stock drive.

If I remember right, with past technologies using serial cables that the second drive would not help a great deal. However, with new systems im not that sure.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated
Jclonts82

 

[nobly]

I'm going to say it will help, but it might not be that noticeable. And it probably won't be worth the amount of $$ you would shell out.

What are you looking for? faster load times?

Please post the rest of your specs as well - perhaps there is another area of your computer that is a higher priority to get your "extra speed".

 

[Jak_Sparra]

you need to tell us what the rest of your system is.
faster hardrive normally only speeds up load times as far as i'm aware.

 

[4745454b]

You speak of speeding up games, I'm not sure you want/need a faster hdd. As others have mentioned, the faster hdd will at best speed up your load time. I point to the PC Modder mag dated Sep. 04. The load time between the Maxtor DM+9 80GB and the 74GB Raptor showed the same 42sec load time for Halo. THE SAME 42SEC LOAD TIME. The raptor provided a higher FPS, 26.57 instead of 26.05. (the raptor gave an extra .5FPS. make sure you notice the decimal point.) To be fair to the raptor, it was much better then any other drive in the synthetic benchies, had a random access time of 7.8ms instead of the maxtors 14.2, but in real world usage your better off spending that $150 on a better video card.

 

[Jak_Sparra]

yep, a good graphics card would probably make a much much much bigger diffrence. (although we still need to see the rest of what your pc is as you may only have something dumb like less then 1gig of memory in a 4000+ athlon system etc and such like)

 

[jaguarskx]

A faster hard drive will allow you to load and save faster, but it really won't do anything to increase frame rates. That's what the video card is for.

Load and save time will only be noticeable with large amounts of data. If the gamesave file is less than 10MB then who cares?

I friend of mine is thinking about getting a Raptor for his PC so that he can boot up faster. I'm telling him it's a waste of money. My HTPC has an old 5400RPM drive and it takes about 40 seconds from a cold start to get into Windows. My friend is salivating over the fact that his co-workers have Raptors and can get into Windows in just under 30 seconds. That difference of about 10 seconds is not worth the extra cost and lower capacity.

Now if I had a gun pointed to my head and I was only given 60 seconds to hack into the Dept. of Defense's network from a cold start, then okay, I'll take the raptor.

 

[Jclonts82]

Well, actually the load time is exactly what I wanted to speed up.
I have an ATI X1900 video card, Dual core pentium extreme's, 4 gig of PC2 5300 ram, but it seems to take forever to load up the levels on BF2. the gameplay itself is spectacular, but I have about $150-200 set aside for an upgrade and wanted to know if the secondary drive would help load times.
I priced a 30 or 37 gig drive in my range, at 15,000 RPM, just wanted to know what type of difference it might make, 5-10 seconds will NOT warrent the buy (I dont want to think of myself as that pathetic), but if it might be something more significant I would definitley like to know

Thanks for all the help
Jclonts82

 

[Codesmith]

The hard drive isn't the main bottle neck for load times for the vast majority of games. Most of the time is spend decompressing the data after its transfered.

You will see some improvement, but far less they you expect. Do the research and see if what you get is worth what you will pay.