What Drive Should I Install Games?

[kimokalihi]

I'm building a pc right now. Not a high end one but a decent medium, IMO.

It consists of :

AMD Athlon64 3200 754(old, I know but it was only 55 bucks on newegg)
2x1GB Sticks of Gskill PC3200
36GB Raptor 10,000 SATA
320GB Seagate Baracuda SATA
EVGA Geforce 7950GT 512MB GDDR3

The only reason I got the small raptor was because a friend sold it to me used for 40 bucks. But I was wondering would my games run faster on the raptor or the seagate? Problem is, with the size of games today I won't be able to fit them all on that drive!

Thanks.

 

[PC_Side_Line]

make the 320 your C drive

and the 36 gig ur d drive

are u sure that the 36 gig drive still works ?

u can place about 4 big games onto the D 36 gig drive.

i would get rid of the 36 gig and get the 40 bucks back. and spend the 40 bucks on an 80 gig hdd, here's the link:

http://www.pricewatch.com/hard_drives/eide_80.0gb.htm

 

[alcattle]

Two ways you could go about out of a couple thousand at least.
1. Partition the Raptor in two, large for os and driver-hardware such. Second partition for your swap file which works the most on most systems.
2. put the os on half and the game you are playing on the other half. Works if you play only one game at a time like me but most play many different games in the same day

 

[jaguarskx]

But I was wondering would my games run faster on the raptor or the seagate?

Having a fast hard drive will not make a game run faster. It will decrease the install time, load time and save time. That's it.

 

[Wonderwill]

make the 320 your C drive

and the 36 gig ur d drive

are u sure that the 36 gig drive still works ?

u can place about 4 big games onto the D 36 gig drive.

i would get rid of the 36 gig and get the 40 bucks back. and spend the 40 bucks on an 80 gig hdd, here's the link:

http://www.pricewatch.com/hard_drives/eide_80.0gb.htm

What are you smoking it's a freakin' raptor! (Worth about $100)

@Kimokalihi: Make the Raptor the C drive and run windows and games off of it.

 

[choirbass]

i agree about using the 36GB raptor for hosting the OS (it always helps to have a quick, responsive OS), plus it is worth about $100... certainly more than the $40 you paid for it... if its broken however, thats a different story..

for games though, its a toss up... if you dont have many large games, i would put the few you have on the raptor along with the OS... if you do have a lot of large games however, i would just go ahead and install them to the larger drive (it has the storage to spare), and then also use that larger drive for extra data you want to keep on it, along with your pagefile and internet cache even (both of which will reduce accessing on the physical OS drive, increasing OS hdd performance as a result), and anything else you would want to store

the raptors random access times are still top notch as far as all other consumer hdds go (~7-8ms for raptors compared to ~14-16ms for other 7200s), which mainly helps with accessing many smaller files quickly, such as with an OS, not to mention noticably improved transfer rates, considering the capacity... but nowadays its transfer rates are more middle of the road compared to other much larger hdds (mainly because its capacity is so small, even with its high rpms)... not bad for a hdd that was released 3-4 years ago, lol... since then theyve had a few revisions for it, each one faster than the last, and larger capacity too, but the 36GB still holds its own, especially where access times are concerned

 

[kimokalihi]

105 bucks on newegg lol.

Anyways, I'll just install the OS on the raptor which is what I was planning on doing. And I guess I'll probably just install the rest of the crap on the other drive. No big deal. I like having two drives anyway because if my OS drive takes a crap or I need to format it, I don't have to burn/lose all my stuff on the other drive.

Thanks!

 

[choirbass]

welcome

as far as losing data, as im sure youre aware, but you should always have replicates of all your essential data stored in at least two physical locations, always have backups... because if all of your stuff is on the larger drive, and nowhere else, and then it fails (or some other mishap)... yeah, lol

so if you dont have a seperate physical drive (the raptor could work too for some backup data), at least get a cd burner, or have a networked location available that you could copy the data to every so often, to keep your backups current

as far as me... i used to never keep backups really, and what i had as a backup, was actually my only drive that had everything on it, wasnt really worried about losing anything... until after a scare of nearly having lost everything, when the external drive overheated and wasnt recognized anymore... i make sure now that i have 4-5 or more hdds containing all of the data, and networked locations too for some files... the reason for so many backups being, that hard drives will fail, no doubt, as will all of the hdds i backed stuff up onto... just a matter of when... 1 week later... ...or 10 years later.

 

[kimokalihi]

Yeah, I was thinking about that as I wrote that last reply. It's nothing TOO important, just a bunch of movies and songs. I mean, it would really suck to lose them but at least it's not something that's not replaceable.

Songs are on the ipod I think and I'm in the process of burning the movies to dvd. Now that I have a divx dvd player, I can fit 6 movies on one dvd instead of just one and it takes about 6 mins to burn a dvd with 6 movies on it opposed to 1.5 to 2 hours to convert and burn one movie on one dvd.

Anyways, I'm going to bed now. Lot of stuff to do tomorrow, it IS valentines day...

 

[yakyb]

personnally i would put the os Office and othe rstuff on the raptor then install games on the 320

that way you have a nice responsive os and when you run games the hdd will be dedicated to it

any way you'll only get a 1 sec loading time difference whatever you do!

plus im guessing the 36 raptor is fairly old therefore probably doesnt have the read speed of the newer seagate

 

[kimokalihi]

Shit, couldn't sleep. I slept from about 4:30 am to about 6:30. So I'm back up and probably for good.

Thanks for all the replies. I will be installing the OS on the raptor, that is if it still works. I'll throw the games on the seagate. If it doesn't I'll go get my money back and maybe I'll buy a new DVD burner or something lol.

Anyone have any opinions on Seagate Barracudas or just Seagate in general? I almost went with a 250gb WD drive but it only had 8mb cache and it was 70 gb smaller for a like 25 bucks difference.

 

[CMenace]

Having a fast hard drive will not make a game run faster. It will decrease the install time, load time and save time. That's it.

Not true for all games. Some games pull hi-res textures off the HD in certain instances and faster HDs will help a lot. Specifically a 10,000 rpm HD makes a big difference when running around the city in Dugeons & Dragons Online (if you have the texture detail on the highest setting).

I would have to say this is probably not very common though.

 

[yakyb]

seagates are fantastic the 7200.10 are one of the fastest (and most reliable) drives around i i run 6 seagates in my system and havnt had a single problem

 

[choirbass]

Anyone have any opinions on Seagate Barracudas or just Seagate in general? I almost went with a 250gb WD drive but it only had 8mb cache and it was 70 gb smaller for a like 25 bucks difference.

well, as a general rule for most hdds, if you have the option of choosing between 8MB cache, and 16MB cache... choose the 16MB, especially if the capacity is larger (and the price is similar), because you will almost always see a performance improvement in transfer rates

 

[powerbaselx]

AMD Athlon64 3200 754(old, I know but it was only 55 bucks on newegg)
2x1GB Sticks of Gskill PC3200
36GB Raptor 10,000 SATA
320GB Seagate Baracuda SATA
EVGA Geforce 7950GT 512MB GDDR3

The only reason I got the small raptor was because a friend sold it to me used for 40 bucks. But I was wondering would my games run faster on the raptor or the seagate? Problem is, with the size of games today I won't be able to fit them all on that drive!

In my case i like to have a fast boot, so i'd install the OS (and swap files) on the Raptor 10K, and the large games on the Seagate 7200.

The games can become faster on the CPU and graphic card, not much on the HD IMO.