Looking for HDD advice

[thedooce]

I've been late on the bandwagon to upgrade my storage disks, and finally ordered a Crucial SSD to replace my old 150GB RaptorX drive for OS and programs. I currently use the Raptor(OS/Programs/Games), and a WD25000KS(general storage), and when I set up the SSD I'd like to replace both of my hard drives with a single, bigger and faster drive for games and storage.

My current motherboard is limited to SATA II speeds, but future proofing with something that can use SATA III would be nice.
Size isn't an issue, all the "new" HDD store much more than I would ever fill up. It would be used for games and general storage, so I assume access time and read speeds are most important.

The other option is to save some cash and use the RaptorX for everything that won't be on the SSD, but I'm guessing current drives blow the old Raptor out of the water for a decent price.

Here are screens of a simple bench done on each drive with HD Tune so you know what kind of performance I'm getting out of my current setup.

 

[sminlal]

SATA II vs. SATA III is irrelevant for hard drives because the maximum transfer rates are limited by the density and spin rate of the platters, not by the connection. Even the fastest hard drives don't get anywhere near the 3Gbit/sec transfer rates of SATA II.

For most people, data files (such as documents, videos, music, photos, etc) don't require anything special in the way of performance. A fast disk helps when you copy large volumes of data to or from the hard drive, and it helps to make your backups run quickly, but just playing music or videos really doesn't stress even the slowest disk. So unless you're doing something intensive like video editing or batch processing of camera photos, I wouldn't spend a lot of time worrying about the performance of your data drive.

 

[thedooce]

Thank you for the response. If the drive would be used for storage and only storage then I probably wouldn't be posting, but like I said there will be games on it too. I'd probably partition 100GB or so at the beginning of the drive for games, and use the rest for general storage. If I wouldn't notice any performance gains with a new 7200RPM drive over my RaptorX for games (load times and such), then I'll stop considering a new HDD.

The other benefit is that I could just have one single HDD to pair up with my SSD vs. the Raptor and other WD drive incase the Raptor fills.