Does OS hard drive speed matter?

[irishbloke]

WAs just wondering if the drive you have windows installed on has any impact on how fast your PC is for games etc?
I know its probably a stupid question and the answer is probably no, but i was just wondering.

For ex
I keep my Os's installed on one oldish 250 gig hard drive. which is i guess quite slow. I keep my games on my newer SATA 2 drive. It doesnt seem like a big deal but im just wondering?

 

[auscanzukus]

Yes, speed matters. I have 2 pc's at home. My main rig & my family pc. Obviously my rig is WAY faster, but it lags behind in terms of loading Vista from power-on. My OS is on a oldie 80 gig sata whereas the other os is on a SATAII partitioned in half. However, after loading programs, my pc owns.

The reason I do this is for maintenance - daily backup of OS drive to storage drive. In the event of a screwup, restoring to yesterday takes 20 mins. Also, I can run a full chkdsk on C while watching videos/listening to music on D.

 

[irishbloke]

So it only impacts the loading speed of the OS? boot up time?

 

[auscanzukus]

All of loading anything. Anytime. Unless the data is cached to memory. In other word, a way to reduce load time is increase the amount of memory.

 

[br3nd064]

It impacts more than just boot time. It will impact anything that's not cached in memory, like auscanzukus said.