Hard Drive speed make a difference gaming?

[Badnames]

Does hard drive speed make a difference for gaming? I'm planning on getting a TB western digital, but my friend swears that 10,000 rpm, not just with load times. Anyone else seen their games run significantly better on a non 7,200 rpm?

P.S. Neither of us know about RAID or whether that helps.

 

[sailer]

A 10,000 drive, such as a Raptor, will speed up loading a game, and perhaps loading different levels within the game, but will not speed up game play itself. Once the game is loaded, its speed depends upon the CPU and the GPU, with a minor part to the ram used, but the hard drive does not affect the game play itself.

 

[dagger]

Even on loading, it's usually only a matter of a fraction of second difference. It's meaningless. Aside from computations, "loading" means basically loading data from hdd to ram. It's accessed from ram during gameplay, and hdd doesn't matter at all.

The only exception is if your computer runs out of ram, and uses a lot of page file off hdd. But then, it'll lag down even with the fastest hdd. So avoid it at any cost.

 

[San Pedro]

Save yourself some money and get more storage for less with a 7,200 rpm. The 640gb WD drives are real good values for hard drives so you might want to consider one or two. I know mine loads vista pretty quick.

 

[Zecow]

Raptors are overrated... you gain.. ummm... what? 3-5 secs of loadtime?

 

[Badnames]

Thanks for the info guys, that helped a lot.